“... shameful days is Tom Bingham, the ex-lord chief justice and legal philosopher, who would have had Johnson scuttling for cover. Both from Balliol, one a credit to the college, the other not. I don’t relish the dilemma of the fellows of Balliol when they are called on to dole out the prime minister’s honorary fellowship. At least when it comes to his ...”

“... of his significance. A notable example appeared in this paper (8 February 1990), when R.W. Johnson sharply criticised Williams’s political judgment and wrote in disparaging terms about the combination of uplift and unrealism allegedly characteristic of the Welsh labour movement from which he was assumed to have emerged. This contested ...”

“... and issued in forms determined by the publishing, cultural and academic orthodoxies of the day. Johnson’s 1955 edition is now routinely taken to embody the ideals and blindnesses of the New Criticism, while an editorial commitment to the variant-strewn manuscripts – a kind of ‘choosing not choosing’ (to borrow the title of an influential book on ...”

“... of this stout and hearty assertion that they took from the anti-prophet Isaiah. The ur-Tory, Samuel Johnson, phrased it most prettily in the lines he added to Goldsmith’s poem, The Traveller:How small, of all that human hearts endure,That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!Still to ourselves in every place consignedOur own felicity we make ...”

“... All actors want to play Disraeli, except fat ones,’ the American filmmaker Nunnally Johnson said. ‘It’s such a showy part – half Satan, half Don Juan, man of so many talents, he could write novels, flatter a queen, dig the Suez Canal. Present her with India. You can’t beat that, it’s better than Wyatt Earp ...”

“... historical trajectory of that domestication was, however, neither easy nor uncontested. In 1660, Samuel Pepys recorded his first encounter with tea – ‘a China drink of which I never had drank before’ – though he turned out to be a coffee man. Some years later he noted that his wife was taking tea on medical advice – ‘a drink which Mr Pelling the ...”

“... appeasers in the peace lobby to other jobs – Halifax went to Washington as ambassador to the US, Samuel Hoare became the ambassador to Spain – and made it clear that a separate peace would be tantamount to surrender. Hohenlohe switched his allegiance from Göring to Himmler and the SS, whose security service he joined, funnelling information to the Swedes ...”

“... the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever written ... I am not, of course, claiming a place for myself among the masters I have named above. (Although, when Lamb is at his most whimsical, I sometimes think I could ...”

“... distaste for pain in the abstract or in others rise to the level of horror’ is given the lie by Samuel Johnson’s anti-vivisectionist essay of 1758: ‘If such cruelties were not practised it were to be desired that they should not be conceived; but, since they are published every day with ostentation, let me be allowed once to mention them, since I ...”

“... Sedgwick (1904-1967). There is a reasonable idea in the fiction of inheritance, especially, say, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, that grandparents or uncles provide the real genealogical clues: but Francis Sedgwick forces himself here into first place. Stories of this kind tend not to begin with Mother (Alice Delano de Forest, born 1908 and still ...”

“... is, had only the ‘Brutus legend’ to guide him to his own history; four centuries later, Dr Johnson was little better informed. Some antiquarians may have noted that the names of the days of the week bore witness to a pagan history (though an Anglo-Saxon, not a Scandinavian one). But neither Vikings nor sagas existed in learned or popular ...”

“... political mobilisation, then by violence.If the Civil War proved anything, Supreme Court Justice Samuel F. Miller declared in 1887, it was that those who believed a strong federal government posed a danger to liberty ‘were in error’. But the enjoyment of freedom by former slaves depended on outside power. For a time, such power was forthcoming. In the ...”

“... and competence can be provided with a platform that presents him as the vigorous option. But as Samuel Moyn argues in his powerful new book, it is a mistake to fixate on the age of recent presidential candidates (Trump and Biden were the oldest candidates in history even in 2020) as emblematic of what he calls ‘gerontocracy in America’. Two-party ...”

“... being a novelist, biographer and countess was president of the Jane Austen Society (along with the Johnson Society, Brontë Society and Dickens Fellowship), claimed that Thompson, like Austen (and perhaps equally falsely), had to write in secret because of family disapproval. Ronald Blythe, reviewing Lark Rise to Candleford in the TLS in 1979, accused John of ...”

“... could give the Novel its generic power was psychological exactitude, especially in the hands of Samuel Richardson. Before Pamela and Clarissa, the term roman referred, he wrote, to ‘a tissue of fantastic and frivolous events which presented a threat to the taste and morals of its readers. I should like another name to be found for the works of ...”