“... against so many.This simile was much reviled by neoclassical critics. In his translation of 1726 Alexander Pope couldn’t bring himself to mention the sausage, and produced instead one of his prissiest euphemisms: ‘As one who long with pale-ey’d famine pin’d,/The sav’ry cates on glowing embers cast.’ Odysseus has returned to Ithaca and is ...”

“... Opposition’s leaders and pet intellectuals, Lord Bolingbroke, William Pulteney, Lord Stair and Alexander Pope. During the crisis caused by Walpole’s attempt to put an excise tax on tobacco in 1733, she distributed division lists and other political propaganda and received deputations of voters. And she used some of her wealth to further the ...”

“... see my letters are scribbled with all the carelessness & inattention imaginable,’ Alexander Pope claimed in a missive of November 1712. ‘My style, like my soul, appears in its natural undress before my friend.’ When Hester Piozzi wrote in 1788 that personal letters were ‘familiar chat spread upon paper’ she was parroting a line at ...”

“... with Swift’s A Modest Proposal.In August 1736, a couple of months after his 48th birthday, Alexander Pope wondered to Swift whether ‘increase of years’ might not make people ‘more talkative but less writative’. His own policy, he went on, was to address only ‘those few I am forced to correspond with, either out of necessity, or love: And ...”

“... nothing’ being the most spectacular. Richard Brinsley Sheridan is another plagiarist; Pope was a complete hypocrite; Kant was another who ‘had never read a book’; Goethe was simply no good. De Quincey, in the words of a genuine student of his, John Jordan, was interested in transcending this literature by ‘mining the German vein’. The ...”

“... Vogue already had her pegged in 1915 as ‘treacle-sweet of tongue but vinegar witted’, it was Alexander Woollcott who created the brand, describing ‘Our Mrs Parker’ in a 1933 Cosmopolitan profile as ‘a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth’. Other friends and frenemies riffed on the theme. Corey Ford opted for animal imagery: Parker was ‘a ...”

“... For drama and pathos try Christopher Logue, and for sheer poetic artistry try Fitzgerald or Alexander Pope. And if, after this, you feel in need of some orality, have some friends round for dinner, put on some music and read it ...”

“... it is still hard to read it as anything but a deliberate exercise in metaphysical make-believe. Alexander Pope may have tried to take it seriously, but the vapid humanism of the Essay on Man, published in 1733, was a muddled travesty of Leibniz’s lofty and impassive stoicism. (‘Of Systems possible, if ’tis confest,/That Wisdom infinite must form ...”

“... years later described himself as a mere ‘under-labourer’ to ‘the incomparable Mr Newton’. Alexander Pope outbid Locke a few years later with his verdict that ‘God said “Let Newton be,” and all was light,’ and Voltaire could hardly open his mouth without praising ‘the mighty Newton’. Levenson promises to explain how a man supposedly ...”

“... Delphic Oracle instructed those who consulted it; Polonius told Laertes to be true to himself; and Alexander Pope said that self-knowledge was ‘the proper study of mankind’. It’s a common counsel, but there is a tension in it. Knowing yourself is supposed to be substantially within your own competence, but the injunction to do it comes from an ...”

“... must have looked like the saviours of Christian civilisation. In 1496 that worldly sophisticate Pope Alexander VI recognised this by awarding Catherine’s parents the title of ‘Catholic Monarchs’. Shrewd dynastic marriages for their children linked the Catholic Monarchs to the rulers of Portugal, the Low Countries and Habsburg Germany and ensured ...”

“... because it presented ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’ (to quote Alexander Pope)? Or was it, perish the thought, a ‘quotation’ for the simple reason that it had appeared in earlier books of quotations, and so could be ripped off by buccaneers like Bartlett?The preface to the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary in ...”

“... he retold the ancient story of Adam’s sin and consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. When Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man in the following century he took care to parallel his work with Milton’s in the opening lines but then replaced the biblical myth with a story of an original (political) State of Nature, out of which we ...”

“... land’. He was received by rulers and prominent figures almost everywhere he went. He met the pope, the kings of France and Portugal, and the Holy Roman Emperor. As he explained: ‘I have come in search of artisans – skilled in manufacturing weapons and firearms – to travel to my land to manufacture them and teach our soldiers.’ The combination of ...”

“... became his raw material. He fixated, for example, on Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, who had carved out a state of his own in northern Italy through considerable military intelligence and diplomatic cunning – and, of course, with the help of his father. ‘This lord is very splendid and magnificent,’ Machiavelli ...”