“... sound on our lips: Christ, master, ale. Language is a cultural construct here, and no one from Jonathan Swift (or even from Edmund Spenser) came to see it as natural. We have survived to inherit the tension between the Latin of non serviam and the Anglo-Saxon of the groans and moans which Beckett used to such effect. But another, more crucial tension ...”

“... Shall​  we never again talk together in laconic?’ Joseph Addison once wrote to Jonathan Swift, by way of inviting him to dinner the next time he happened to be in London. It’s the kind of invitation that might well appeal to Helen DeWitt, an ardent admirer of 18th-century wits and philosophers, and a classicist whose erudition undoubtedly extends to a familiarity with the defining features of Spartan rhetoric (Laconia is the region of the south-eastern Peloponnese which includes the city of Sparta ...”

“... venerated alongside Alexander Pope, who held that ‘Most Women have no Characters at all,’ or Jonathan Swift, who, at the conclusion of that catalogue of excremental horrors ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, has his speaker remark: ‘Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because she rose from stinking Ooze?’ Or even Samuel Johnson. If women’s ...”

“... scourges of our time. His editor was surely ill-advised to prefix to the book a quotation from Jonathan Swift, who cared for ordinary people and never took a penny for any of his writing except Gulliver’s ...”

“... must be so tired and perplexed with your labour, in trying to make out a good character for Mr Jonathan Swift.’ This, of course, is part of what Dickens seized on and twisted into ‘Podsnappery’. (Dr Davies has made the beautiful discovery – first published by him in the Dickensian a few years ago – that in Forster’s very first review, of ...”

“... print debut in the 1709 miscellany, which also contained work by rising names like Anne Finch and Jonathan Swift. His sumptuous editions of classical poets in Latin or English (Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Ovid, Virgil) cast reflected glory on his vernacular list. When an ambitious Oxford graduate called Basil Kennett told Tonson in 1696 that he ...”

“... while ‘it has been difficult ... to avoid writing this book in any other spirit than that which Jonathan Swift termed “savage indignation”, the effort has been made ... to write with an appropriate measure of restraint.’ Yet the overall tone of this work, consciously written from the other side of the abyss of genocide, is more often bitter than ...”

“... a pedantic intricacy similar, it has often been argued, to the fiction of Joyce and Jonathan Swift. Joyce himself was a firm believer in such ‘Celtic’ qualities, and they offer an obvious context for his own art. Do we have here – as Vivian Mercier, for one, has implied – an unbroken tradition of genuinely Irish expression ...”

“... sight’, another is ‘Alice in Wonderland syndrome’; naturally it has been suggested that Jonathan Swift may have experienced it during his demented final years, while Charles Dodgson may have based Alice’s distortions of scale on an account of mushroom-eating Siberian shamans in Mordecai Cooke’s drug compendium, Seven Sisters of Sleep ...”

“... him for the entrance examinations and ends up reading English at Hertford College, ‘where Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh had once been students’. ‘I seldom speak of it,’ he confesses, ‘because to say “When I was at Oxford ...” sounds suspect even to me, like the opening of one of my father’s bullshit stories.’ At Oxford, Wolff ...”

“... and cheapness of collection. The 18th century was well aware of what we now call the Laffer curve. Jonathan Swift pointed out ‘a Secret, which I learned many years ago from the Commissioners of the Customs in London. They said, when any Commodity appeared to be taxed above a moderate rate, the Consequence was to lessen that Branch of the Revenue by one ...”

“... men who would, if necessary, protect him. The pantomime was less outlandish than it sounds (Jonathan Swift used similar ruses with Gulliver’s Travels in 1726) but there were further embellishments, including half a page of ‘scolop’d paper’ cut with a jagged edge; Edwards must only release copies to a courier who could show the corresponding ...”

“... artistic spirit; but not all artists have viewed their trade in this high-minded manner. Jonathan Swift or Samuel Johnson would have been dismayed by this grandiose inflation of their literary hackwork. And who knows how Aeschylus or the author of Beowulf regarded their craft? It would be rash to assume that they thought of it in the same way ...”

“... about its ephemeral nature. We come across this in an imaginary conversation between Orwell and Jonathan Swift, an introductory talk to Arms and the Man largely concerned with Shaw the satirist and with whether his plays survive when the political battles are won, a piece on Wilde as social critic, and a ‘featurised’ version of ‘The Emperor’s ...”

“... Foot was an outstanding journalist. He wrote an academic work of distinction about the role of Jonathan Swift in the politics of his day, The Pen and the Sword. In the Fifties he became a top TV personality on, first, In the News and then Free Speech. In a passage which makes one cringe (for Foot, not for the authors) we read of how Beaverbrook ...”