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“... marriage must be fabulously – nay, more than fabulously – happy. This was ridiculous, and Samuel Johnson was close enough to Hester Thrale to have known, had he chosen to let himself know it, that her marriage was a long vexation beginning and ending in nightmare. Johnson had too much investment in the Thrale marriage to let himself face the truth ...”

“... literary scholarship and creative writing: disciplines which differ in their points of reference (Samuel Richardson v. Jhumpa Lahiri), the graduate degrees they award (Doctor of Philosophy v. Master of Fine Arts) and their perceived objects of study (‘literature’ v. ‘fiction’). Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of ...”

“... stab the high priest in the back.’ The appropriation for radical purposes of canonical writers (Samuel Richardson in The Rape of Clarissa of 1982, Shakespeare in the series of revisionary readings of the canon which Eagleton edits for Blackwell) mirrors the attempt of Terence and his fellow authors of The Slant Manifesto (1966) to radicalise the ...”

“... every thing clever and agreeable can be so common as this word So wrote Lady Bradshaigh to Samuel Richardson in 1749. She is not the only person to have been puzzled by the phenomenon of the sentimental, both word and thing; nor by the equally proliferating possibilities and applications of the word ‘sensibility’. A great many modern ...”

“... themselves, her riposte to all who have despitefully used her. They thus coincide oddly with Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-48), though in that instance the heroine has to trust that the posthumous editing of collected papers will do her justice. Both Mrs Pilkington’s Memoirs and Clarissa are works of vindication, retorts to a cruel and wrongheaded ...”

“... in particular. It is no accident that the two earliest pioneers of the English novel, Defoe and Samuel Richardson, both wrote conduct books just before they turned to fiction. Richardson’s Familiar Letters tested friends and relations through imagined exchanges of letters, but the moral quandaries were ...”

“... class and gender. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel opens with a brilliant consideration of Samuel Richardson’s career. In addition to writing three important and influential novels – which take the form of letters compiled, edited, arranged, prefaced, annotated or excerpted by an inscribed editor, and in which the appropriation and quotation ...”

“... and ‘patronising’ Item: in a chapter on Richardson (wittily called ‘Richardson, alas’ after ‘Hugo, hélas’), Rawson quotes a curious letter in which the novelist asks a friend to come to Tunbridge Wells, where she will be able to see a figure more ...”

“... and others in 1937 – and furthered by the History Workshop movement launched in 1966 by Raphael Samuel. The modest social origins and leftish sympathies of many academic historians had generated a concern with the lives of ‘ordinary’ people rather than those of the political, social and intellectual elites. In subsequent decades, feminist historians ...”

“... they weren’t as safe as they should be. Ehrich’s first tutor in magic was his father. Mayer Samuel Weiss had brought his wife, Cecilia, and three sons to the US from Hungary in 1878 and settled in Appleton. With his exotic accent and formidable physical presence he was able to convince the townspeople to accept him as the local rabbi even though in ...”

“... suggests, ‘represented themselves … as reading such European writers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Germaine de Staël and Scott, but denigrated or avoided naming their actual competition: such bestselling sentimental novelists as Kotzebue, de Genlis, Lafontaine and Sophie Cottin.’ Hoogenboom applies to Russia an ...”

“... the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever written ... I am not, of course, claiming a place for myself among the masters I have named above. (Although, when Lamb is at his most whimsical, I sometimes think I could go a ...”

“... deft and thoughtful study. In 1957 Watt published The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Few works of criticism from the second half of the 20th century have been more influential. The Rise of the Novel, MacKay reports, ‘continues to be amplified, supplemented or attacked – it must somehow be reckoned with – by every ...”

“... the OED and Webster’s Third – of indicating the social status of a word. Mencken confuses Samuel Johnson the writer with Dr Johnson the ogre and bully portrayed by Boswell. James Murray, the author of the OED, succumbed to the same confusion, perhaps, when in a dream he imagined that Johnson was speaking of his Dictionary and Boswell, in an impish ...”

“... through the dark and coming up over a hill. Beautifully shot, as the whole movie is, by Robert Richardson, a welcome Oscar nominee. Then the riders pause. In spite of the apparent evidence of the previous shots, they can’t see. There is something wrong with the placing of the eyeholes in their hoods. They tear at the hoods, curse and quarrel, and the man ...”