“... demands vast ingenuity, and to avoid theorising requires vast honesty.’ In his vast honesty, Dr Johnson stands as the greatest of English critics, and his greatness is not distinct from his sustained and rational opposition to philosophy and to theory.‘The task of criticism’ was, for Johnson, to ‘establish ...”

“... to sack workers because they had refused to join their closed-shop union made libertarians blench. Christopher Hitchens was not alone in ridiculing him: ‘Pay policy, government secrecy, expenditure cuts – you name it and Foot will find a windy justification for it.’ Worst of all, Foot toured India and gave strong public support to Mrs Gandhi’s ...”

“... to fall within the same tradition as Darwin. Probably none of our other leading historians – Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Keith Thomas – will gain such dubious recognition either. Alan’s style of narrative history has drawn criticism in recent years from young historians seeking a more ‘fundamental’ history in ...”

“... of doubt that was lost in his transcription. Now, in a new critical edition by Ian Forrest and Christopher Whittick, the visitation book is available in full translation for the first time.* As they write: ‘It is not an objective record of what was happening in medieval parishes, being in fact much more fascinating than that.’ In 1397 the visitors ...”

“... Before 1922 Hugh MacDiarmid did not exist. And only Christopher Murray Grieve would have dared to invent him. Alan Bold’s valuable biography points out that when the 30-year-old Grieve began to write in the Scottish Chapbook under the pseudonym ‘M’Diarmid’, he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A ...”

“... Harriet Guest’s starting-point is Donald Davie’s suggestion in 1958 that Christopher Smart might be considered ‘the greatest poet between Pope and Wordsworth’. Her intelligent and carefully argued book does not deliver quite the far-reaching reassessment of Smart’s status Davie must have had in mind. He wanted Smart to be judged over the whole range of his poetic output, both conventional and unconventional, ‘light and ribald as well as devotional, urbane or tender as well as sublime ...”

“... is set down in a terse, almost shorthand style, we learn that Forster had been cruel as a cat to Christopher Isherwood the night before, that he had sucked up to Williams in a queenly manner and that, in the opinion of ‘The Bird’ (Vidal’s usual term for Tennessee’s person of plumage and flutter), he was an old gentleman ‘with urinestained ...”

“... and this is a Clint ‘pre-empurpled’ by ‘Potentium’ (i.e. Viagra). He has tried every Johnson-enlarger advertised in his inbox, to no avail: Clint Smoker, we’re told again and again, has a fantastically tiny cock. Women scorn Clint and Clint scorns women, writing misogynist rants under the byline ‘Yellow Dog’. Friendless, he tries to make do ...”

“... spoke of a ‘credibility gap’ rather than give awful utterance to the thought that the Johnson Administration was systematically lying. To restore its ‘credibility’, that Administration was urged, not to stop lying, but to improve its public presentation. At some stage in the lesson learned from that injunction, the era of post-modern politics ...”

“... Earlier this year, Andrew Marr certified it dead. (He was announcing the shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction at the time. His verdict may prove to be no less premature than Johnson’s pronouncement on Sterne: ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’) Responding to Marr’s ...”

“... At Thomas Hodgkin’s memorial service, in 1982, Christopher Hill, formerly Master of Balliol, used the pulpit of the college chapel to give an address entirely free of religious reference, quite a feat in view of Hodgkin’s Quaker roots and Hill’s status as historian of the Puritan revolution. ‘God was dead all right when you wrote that speech,’ I said to Hill afterwards ...”

“... on the orders of his own father – a quasi-criminal Joe Kennedy figure. Or was Lyndon Johnson, elevated to president on Kennedy’s death, a Texan and the politician who ramped up America’s military involvement in Vietnam, the obvious beneficiary of the assassination? Barbara Garson’s cod Shakespearean drama MacBird! (1966) smears ...”

“... dominated these villages during the war and it now guaranteed a monolithic Zanu vote at the polls. Christopher Soames, the British pro-consul sent out to supervise the election, knew exactly what was going on but balked at the notion of taking military action to get the guerrillas back into their camps or, alternatively, declaring the vote null and void. In ...”

“... Otherwise, these pages crumble before the eye like yesterday’s (or today’s) effusion from Paul Johnson. And this would be all knockabout stuff if it were not for the fact that – like the writing of the aforesaid Johnson – it has calcified around an increasingly nasty core. The early chapters of this little book are ...”

“... I have heard great argument about it and about, from reminiscences of the Trotsky assassination to Christopher Hill’s recall of the Papal incitement against Gloriana, but evermore came out by the same door as in I went. The Salman Rushdie case has no analogue and no precedent. Once that is established, it is fair to ask how it could have, considering the ...”