“... married her for money and influence, and to have gone in fear of her female will. According to J. Steven Watson’s Preface – one of two excellent introductory pieces, the other being by the editor of the volume – Townshend’s customs duties led to the loss of America, and his death in 1767 concluded a train of dazzling Parliamentary feats and ...”

“... between the mid-17th and mid-19th centuries: Milton, Hobbes, Dryden, Locke, Addison, Pope, Hume, Johnson, Gibbon, Smith, Scott, Austen, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Malthus, Carlyle, Dickens, Macaulay, Mill, George Eliot and more. The passing of the heroic age of biographical dictionary-making is nowhere more clearly signalled than in the fact that in the ODNB the ...”

“... dogs,’ a former neighbour of Zainab’s said. ‘Like, there was this guy on the 15th floor, Steven Power, he had two bull terriers, you know those dogs? Loved them, he did. Would’ve died for those two dogs.’ People in the tower would go round to Steven’s for a drink. Sometimes they sat together outside the ...”

“... probed, and monitored.’ More than ten years later, it was still possible for the singer Holly Johnson to tell Simon Garfield: You go to these doctors and basically they don’t know a fuck! They just don’t know a fuck. Really! And they’ll admit it even, if you press them. They say, ‘Yes, we know a bit about treating the symptoms, but really we ...”

“... this stout and hearty assertion that they took from the anti-prophet Isaiah. The ur-Tory, Samuel Johnson, phrased it most prettily in the lines he added to Goldsmith’s poem, The Traveller:How small, of all that human hearts endure,That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!Still to ourselves in every place consignedOur own felicity we make or find.(Of ...”