“... establishment are presented as a perfect image of American business organisation. The Yale Boswell industry, for example, is described as an editorial project ‘on the model of American corporate enterprise’ funded by the Mellon banking fortunes. The American Society for 18th-Century Studies, with its regional subsidiaries, its journal and ...”

“... books were not ‘good writing’, but more ‘a sort of pious journalism’, and he cites Jonathan Swift as holding a similar opinion. However, Baxter’s verses, in emulation of George Herbert’s, are still anthologised, read and even more frequently sung in churches. His ‘pious journalism’ about the class structure of the parties to the English ...”

“... rags.’ Calder might have appended to this quotation Dr Johnson’s objection, to the admiring Boswell: ‘Nay, Sir, don’t you perceive that one link cannot clank?’ There was no ‘human reason’, Calder holds, for Ireland not taking a full part in the Industrial Revolution; and he dwells on lack of coal. An alternative view would be that the ...”

“... as Francis Coventry, Thomas Holcroft or Robert Paltock should be left out. (Not to mention James Boswell, author of Dorando.) The omission of John Cleland may be deliberate and provocative – it provokes me to cheerful assent – but Spender’s researches have apparently not extended to the point were she has heard of Congreve’s famous ...”

“... he met all the great figures of the day: Voltaire, Condorcet, Marie-Antoinette, Captain Cook, Boswell, Johnson (on 1 May 1760, at a meeting to promote ‘the education of Negroes in America’). He also met the exponents of the free market Adam Smith and Bernard Mandeville. But though he delighted in their company, he scarcely needed to pick their ...”

“... later, ‘when Fielding’s beloved first wife died in November 1744, moved into his house at Boswell Court to console her brother, remaining with him there until he married again three years later’. There is a considerable escalation of innuendo within a few short pages of the book itself, and another escalation between this part of the book and the ...”

“... has none. The last governor, arriving on 9 July 1992, soon began to sound very much like Lee. Jonathan dimbleby’s The Last Governor makes brisk, almost effortless reading for a book on a complex subject. This child’s-guide effect is achieved by a simple moral scheme, avoiding analytic subtleties and conflicts of principle. Claiming Patten as a ...”

“... names in contemporary North American literary criticism and theory: Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jonathan Goldberg, Judith Fetterley, Jean Schwind, Elizabeth Ammons. Acocella takes no prisoners. She is queen of the devastating citation, and more than happy to let the jargon-mad professors hang themselves. Thus poor Robert Nelson, author of a 1988 book on the ...”

“... Roth: Unmasked; and for his eightieth birthday he was given an all-star tribute in Newark where Jonathan Lethem, Edna O’Brien and Hermione Lee, among others, held his genius up to the jewelled light with a series appreciation later collected in Philip Roth at Eighty: A Celebration (a Library of America special publication). A year later, comity breaking ...”