“... of Gerzina’s book). Neither writer refers to Gory, the black manservant of Lord Monboddo, whom Johnson and Boswell encountered on their 1773 tour of the Hebrides, or Pablo Fanque (a.k.a. William Darby), the acrobat and North of England circus proprietor. We still don’t know how successfully black people integrated with their local communities in towns ...”

“... Johnson wrote The Lives of the Poets,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning grumbled, ‘and left out the poets.’ She exaggerated, of course, but a book of that title which omitted Chaucer and Shakespeare, Spenser and all the Elizabethans, Donne and nearly all the Jacobeans, while including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith, Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading ...”

“... her crossed arms; but so, as not more than one side of it to be hid. Carol Houlihan Flynn’s Samuel Richardson is alert and sensible, and diligent in its rounding-up of backgrounds – rape cases, sentimental fiction, rake-literature – but is fairly predictable in its judgments. Pamela is awkward but interesting, Clarissa a brooding masterpiece and Sir ...”

“... on the economic front generated social protest, industrial unrest, and the revival of ideology. As Samuel Beer demonstrated in his book Britain against Itself, this simple theory of cause and effect is mechanical and misleading. In the late Sixties Britain was swept by a revolt against deference. The revolt took many contrasting and conflicting forms, but the ...”

“... played a leading role. A former Government minister who fell out with the military regime of Samuel Doe, Taylor managed to escape from a Massachusetts jail in 1985: he was being held pending extradition on embezzlement charges. He launched his bid for power on Christmas Eve 1989, when a small band of his fighters entered Liberia from the east intending ...”

“... of literary studies, being an off-shoot of History; it isn’t surprising that Boswell’s Life of Johnson competes with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall for the title of the greatest literary work of the 18th century. Professor Mack acknowledges this affiliation with History as he pays tribute to helpers in the Preface to his Life of Pope: ‘dear Daughters of ...”

“... at home. Since then, Britain has lost its empire, but not its entanglements. In Part Two Paul Johnson writes of working-class borrowings and savings between 1870 and 1939. Pawnshop loans were in perpetual demand. Thrift, to the surprise of observers, was oftener a provision for burial than for sickness, and funeral spending was often curiously lavish. So ...”

“... their differences to keep escalating. Despite the ominous backdrop of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon began a series of occasional bilateral discussions with Leonid Brezhnev aimed at managing the Cold War more calmly. Tensions in Asia were high, and China’s rivalry with the Soviet Union was intensifying, while the Berlin Wall had ...”

“... Samuel Richardson’s account of a servant girl’s defence of her virtue against the advances of her lascivious master (‘Mr B’), given in her own letters, made what we now call ‘the Novel’ (though Richardson never attached this label to his book) respectable. Pamela caused an unprecedented stir, exciting something like a national argument about the purposes and value of fiction ...”

“... is no more of an anaesthetic. The epigraph that introduces Cold Snap is taken from the Book of Samuel: estrangement from the prophet leaves Saul with black moods that are only relieved by David’s lyre. But music for Jones’s characters is rarely restorative. Their Vietnam War is not fought against a mythic soundtrack of rock and roll. Only in ...”

“... overpraising Joseph Mankiewicz; five years later, he was ‘both admiring and jealous’ of ... Samuel Fuller. Some of this excitement was due to the war time absence of American movies; afterwards, they burst on France as French, Italian and Swedish films burst on Britain. Truffaut devotes long sections of the book to his American heroes – including not ...”

“... defeated streets which lies between Camden Road and St Pancras’. For the English reader, Denys Johnson-Davies’s extensive collection of Arabic short stories ought to have something of the opposite effect. Here are no less than 24 stories by different authors chosen from the entire Arabic-speaking world: Egypt in particular, but also the Sudan, Saudi ...”

“... as South Korea and Taiwan, could have been adapted and implemented. But Donald Trump and Boris Johnson chose instead to claim immunity. ‘I think it’s going to work out fine,’ Trump announced on 19 February. On 3 March, the day the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies warned against shaking hands, ...”

“... nasty. But it tastes worse when nothing has been apologised or paid for. Both Taylor and Prince Johnson, famous for chopping former president Samuel Doe to death on video, have become pastors, and are now fond of saying that they’ve been ‘arrested by God’ so no one else need bother. One notorious thug, General ...”

“... Mansfield’ by John Singleton Copley (1782) On one level, Mansfield’s was a model career and Samuel Smiles wrote of him with reverence. His wife, Elizabeth, to whom he was devotedly married for 46 years, was the daughter of an earl and the granddaughter of a lord chancellor. A dutiful but not excessively devout Anglican, he prospered at the bar, then ...”