“... the compulsory planting of trees was passed in 1503. The denudation continued nonetheless. Samuel Johnson lost his oak stick during his Scottish tour in 1773. Assured by Boswell that it hadn’t been stolen, he said: ‘No, no, my friend, it is not to be expected that any man in Mull, who has got it, will part with it. Consider, Sir, the value of such a piece ...”

“... rump? It must be charity. Look at the cameras. There aren’t enough of them to bring out Boris Johnson, who never failed, in all the years of his mayoralty, to insert himself on the television ‘news where you are’ for London: in hardhat, bicycle helmet, scrumcap squashed down on the finger-flicked golden mopflop of thuggish charm. A vortex of ...”

“... and a momentary loss of speech, it must have been around the time of the stand-off between Boris Johnson and the Supreme Court because the young doctor in A&E at UCH testing my mental capacity asked me what the word was for closing down Parliament, i.e. proroguing, which I got in one.7 July. I am a messy eater, messy altogether Rupert would say, and getting ...”

“... Johnson wrote The Lives of the Poets,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning grumbled, ‘and left out the poets.’ She exaggerated, of course, but a book of that title which omitted Chaucer and Shakespeare, Spenser and all the Elizabethans, Donne and nearly all the Jacobeans, while including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith, Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading ...”

“... dead. The greatest writing was like some monument, untouchable and serene. One thinks of Samuel Johnson on Skye telling Boswell that an eloquent inscription commemorating a local worthy in a parish church ‘should have been in Latin, as every thing intended to be universal and permanent, should be’. The deathless, lifeless qualities of poetry that Gray ...”

“... Co, a family firm famous for its clientele: Humphrey Bogart! Marlene Dietrich! Fred Astaire! The Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson! Each customer was measured, and the findings entered in a series of ledgers known as the ‘Feet Books’; the bespoke shoemakers then modelled wooden lasts to be used to make the shoes; these effigies were labelled with the ...”

“... privately owned land in Europe. The countess and her husband were further ennobled to become the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland in 1833. The duke is remembered by a massive statue that still stands on the top of Ben Bhraggie, surviving frequent mutilation: a memorial that was reviled long before anyone thought to take a ...”

“... the way he expressed them seemed like a return to the sinewy and colloquial manner of Dryden or Johnson, the no-nonsense prose that corresponded to the Metaphysicals’ directness and wit in verse. After flowery and carefully euphonious Edwardian fine writing, the paragraphs of a George Moore or of Chesterton himself with his well-turned ...”

“... What was it that Samuel Johnson said about Laurence Sterne’s unusual novel? ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’ I wonder whether the Doctor would have said the same had he lived long enough to reach the end of The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, whose odd title is only explained on page 584, when we come across a quote from The Alchemist ...”

“... besieged. News and supplies were delivered. Guests arrived, notably the botanist Thomas Johnson, the engraver William Faithorne and the elderly architect Inigo Jones. There was a wedding. Spies came and went. Deserters were caught and hanged. A plot to betray the house was uncovered. Then, early in 1644, the massing of Royalist forces around ...”

“... debtors in their jails, young gents at Eton and Winchester. The comfortable classes, from the Iron Duke downwards, fretted that the country was staggering towards revolution.And out of the taverns where the plots were hatched poured the most extraordinary cast of desperadoes and craftsmen down on their luck, their life stories preserved verbatim, by the ...”

“... of the earliest kittens to fluster Benson with his friskiness) or Eton masters like William Johnson Cory and Oscar Browning, his fear of sex was so great that he could keep his footing in the ‘precarious trade’ of schoolmastering and avoid that common exile for the too attentive Etonian pederast, a fellowship at King’s. Having chosen to lock ...”

“... the tour with an appearance on Crossfire, a public-affairs programme on which two antagonists duke it out, each with her very own hostile interviewer; as a friend remarked, it’s like being locked in a room with your own rabid dog. I debated Hillary Johnson, whose book Osler’s Web, argues that the Government has ...”

“... All actors want to play Disraeli, except fat ones,’ the American filmmaker Nunnally Johnson said. ‘It’s such a showy part – half Satan, half Don Juan, man of so many talents, he could write novels, flatter a queen, dig the Suez Canal. Present her with India. You can’t beat that, it’s better than Wyatt Earp ...”

“... roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous crowds. Activists among the country gentry, incensed by the long prorogation of Parliament in 1675, and by then convinced that Charles II would never accept Parliament as a partner in government, had for some years ...”