“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is now determined to avenge its humiliation by the Supreme Court in 2019 when it threw out Boris Johnson’s illegal attempt to prorogue Parliament. Suella Braverman, the attorney general, spoke for Johnson and many others in this Tory cabinet when she proclaimed that ‘we must take back control’ from the ...”

“... intent were an expression of antisemitism. The response, which I signed along with Adam Tooze, Samuel Moyn, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and others, condemned Hamas’s actions of 7 October and affirmed the ‘vital need to protect Jewish life in Germany in the face of rising antisemitism’. It insisted that we must not ‘close down the space for debate and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in general, in just these terms. Five years after he died she told a prospective biographer, Samuel French Morse, that ‘Mr Stevens’s poetry was a distraction that he found delight in, and which he kept entirely separate from his home life’ (her emphasis). As a further discouragement, she made clear to Morse her personal dislike of her husband’s ...”

“... aloud for corks.The connection between the Cave of Spleen and Pope’s own retreat was made early: Samuel Lewis’s 1785 plan of the grotto, sold to the tourists who had been flocking there ever since Pope’s death in 1744, labels one of its principal chambers ‘the Cave of Pope’. The bulk of the villa was demolished in 1808 and the grotto fell into ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... since Gibbon, the Puritans as wittily as Hume, the egotistical faith of Milton as delectably as Dr Johnson. (How did Macaulay come to decide that Milton was not an egotist?) Trevor-Roper’s indictments offer fundamental challenges to historians who approach those subjects with different preconceptions or who suppose themselves to have no preconceptions at ...”

“... and temperamental … Nothing is more subjective and individual as personal taste.’ Hugh Johnson sticks with the crudity of stars (one star = ‘plain, everyday quality’; four stars = ‘grand, prestigious, expensive’) and tries to persuade himself that ‘the whole unreal business’ may eventually go away. It’s an American ...”

“... Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence. According to Johnson, he was a remarkable instance of ‘how far impudence may carry ignorance’. Taylor himself – my John Taylor – later became oculist to George III, a job he shared with his brother. The post was unpaid and undemanding: though Taylor seems to have been ...”

“... known one thing about Anna Letitia Barbauld, which was her appearance in a droll anecdote told by Samuel Taylor Coleridge towards the end of his life and recorded in the posthumous volume of his Table Talk. ‘Mrs Barbauld told me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were – that it was improbable, and had no moral,’ Coleridge is ...”

“... to epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, cultural analysis and literary criticism, that, as Samuel Hynes observed, it is very difficult to see how the work could ever have cohered into a single enterprise. Each volume is hectic, overwritten, easily distracted and confusingly organised, fighting on several fronts at once. ‘It would be in your own ...”