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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Newington farm for civet cats has entered literary mythology – but without lasting success. As Johnson was to say of Richard Savage, another denizen of Grub Street, ‘he was therefore obliged to seek some other means of support; and, having no profession, became by necessity an author.’ The accession of the Roman Catholic James II in 1685, and his ...”

“... Ever since Samuel Johnson’s icy comment of 1775 – ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ – British observers have felt a little sour about the American Revolution. For Tories like Johnson, the colonists were ungrateful wretches who had squandered the precious gift of British liberty ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... isn’t nostalgic for the USSR but is more fantastical, blending Baptism of the Rus’ with Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations. Similar worldviews extend well beyond Moscow. Andrew CockburnIn​  a secret memorandum dated 6 April 1960, a US State Department official called Lestor Mallory spelled out the ultimate purpose of American ...”

“... Scottish contempt for the Westminster political leadership reached new heights under Boris Johnson (and threatens to rise even further under Liz Truss), so this should be easy enough. But the SNP has held power in Scotland for fifteen years and has its own list of embarrassments, notably in the areas of public health, education and industrial ...”

“... Index was fitted to a London cab: the first taxi-meter. The Magnetic Telegraph Company, founded by Samuel Morse, was already two years old. Edison wasn’t the only American legend born in 1847; so was the outlaw Jesse James. The lawman Wyatt Earp was born in 1848: Earp and James and Edison might have inhabited different planets, but one of the ironies of this ...”

“... women used opium routinely, to sedate themselves and their children. For the more exotic figure of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, addiction started while he was at the great university standing on the edge of the sad East Anglian plain. The Trojan horse in Coleridge’s case was his teeth, which ached relentlessly. A certain sympathy must extend to him, since ...”