“... 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 ...”

“... no blockheaded aristo; he was an educated bon viveur, who had won the friendship and admiration of Jonathan Swift during his spell in Ireland as Lord Lieutenant. Swift said that at Christ Church, Oxford, ‘with a singularity scarce to be justified, he carried away more Greek, Latin and philosophy than properly became a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we learn of ‘the distinctive prose that Beckett, using French models in the main, though with Jonathan Swift whispering ghostly in his ear, was in the process of perfecting for himself, lyrical and mordant in equal measures’. And are told that Celan’s poem ‘Death Fugue’makes two huge implicit claims about what poetry in our time is, or should ...”

“... at the Folklore Society said Lang had jumbled up genuinely ancient tales with the work of Jonathan Swift and the French fabulists, whose fairies and giants were merely their own inventions. Yet this was a literary not a scientific venture, one less interested in curating immemorial fragments than in showing readers what it was like to think with ...”

“... this list, according to a leaked report in the Sunday Times, H.E. Bates nestles side by side with Jonathan Swift, and Ted Hughes with Chaucer. A generation ago, Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia would probably have been selected; nowadays hardly anybody reads Lambs essays, although teachers nervous of starting on Shakespeare with 14-year-olds are urged to ...”

“... rhyme enemies or rats to death still excited the imagination of poets of the age of Ben Jonson or Swift. Sometimes the enemy destroyed was a rival poet, and perhaps this is what the tradition eventually narrowed down to. Jonson and more recently Roy Campbell are on record as threatening to destroy some fellow poets – in the latter case, better ones – who ...”

“... that makes me wonder how far such claims can be pressed. Septimus is very well read. ‘There was Swift too,’ Woolf noted in a draft of a scene in which Septimus reflects on the uncompromising ‘message’ he has found in the works of other writers who in his view have also seen through human hypocrisy and insincerity: Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare. ...”

“... believed a win would be good for the nation, the mind of Ireland freed, raw body, old head, albeit Swift died mad. The ‘Irish Salamis’ is a price you must pay for some victory over and above Pearse And Connolly and the ‘right rose tree’. It is, as he said, also ‘liable to bias’. The Queen at the wall in Ireland was not entirely unlike Willy ...”

“... achieves a miraculous release from his forty-year pre-adolescence and is made to undergo a swift, bruising rite of passage into adulthood. Hair sprouts on his chest, his voice breaks, he gets his first erection and to his own wide-eyed bewilderment finds himself in the midst of an awakening that is at once sexual, romantic and political. All of which ...”

“... at Luxor as ‘the bitter harvest of the last decade’. ‘It was like an earthquake: it was swift and devastating at the epicentre, but its economic and political aftershocks were longer and more pervasive.’ The terrorists ‘exposed the vulnerability of the state, the fragility of the economy and the soft underbelly of society’. As New Yorkers must ...”

“... a clock-like rhythm to this description of a daily routine, written by a man obsessed with time. Jonathan Richardson (1667-1745), the son of a London silk weaver, rose to prominence in the early decades of the 18th century as England’s leading art theorist and portraitist. Abandoning a career as a scrivener, he went on to paint writers ...”

“... we sometimes call Augustan, of which the dominant representatives in Fielding’s lifetime were Swift and Pope. Early in his career he sometimes called himself Scriblerus Secundus, after their famous coterie the Scriblerus Club. One of his earliest poems, however, was an unfinished mock-Dunciad against them, discovered some twenty years ago by Isobel Grundy ...”

“... be a minor typographical variant of the shorthand for ‘manuscript’. Casey Miller and Kate Swift, in Words and Women (1976), say Ms has been around since the 1940s, but remained largely unused and didn’t get into a dictionary until 1972. One factor in its resurgence was ‘the growth of direct mail selling’, for which the abbreviation was felt to ...”

“... modesty, he can at times seem slightly crazy in his ambitions, as if he has been invented by Swift. For Spinoza, as for most laymen at all times, philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom and of the salvation and happiness to be realised only in the right conduct of life. Philosophy takes over the functions of the historical religions, and the theory of ...”