“... his bronze fist against the twisty tail of Home Rule – a theatrical gesture he copied from James Larkin who raised the dragon people against their bosses but let’s say instead that Cadmus is Willie Whitelaw sitting at a bootshaped table with the Spartoi – they wear hoods balaclava helmets and dark glasses – here Cyadmus one of the hoods says ye ...”

“... could not believe when he told of a Brother. Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, marginal annotation to Boswell’s Life of Johnson Here is a museum. Visitors may see in it Nero’s couch, a statue of Cerberus and a skeleton of an Ethiopian, the bones stuck with porcupine quills. Here is a cabinet of curiosities. In it are a ribbon pretending to have belonged to ...”

“... too simple, because those with health anxieties are among the busiest people on earth. The young Boswell, travelling in Holland, was prey to all sorts of debilitating symptoms: ‘Oh dear! I am very ill.’ A friend advises keeping a journal and ‘debauching a Dutch girl’. The journal meant as a solution then becomes ...”

“... be far better at home, but the mind wants a change. In several of Ian Fleming’s thrillers James Bond (who is much more interested in food and drink than in sex and killing people) derides the lyric menus of the American eatery, promising flaky-fresh sole and dawn-tender steak: he never orders anything with his bourbon but eggs benedict, or scrambled ...”

“... journalists and printers were often the same people. It was the age of Grub Street, of Boswell and Johnson, coffee houses, clay pipes and gallons of port. In 1812 Murray II moved the firm to Albemarle Street in the more respectable West End, where it remained until the seventh John Murray sold up in 2002. Here Murray’s built a list that included ...”

“... religious history, of Jacobitism and the previous abortive attempts to restore the descendants of James II to the throne. Instead we go straight into a military encounter, the Battle of Prestonpans, on 21 September 1745. ‘Two armies were moving to contact in the country to the east of Edinburgh’ is the book’s first sentence: the armies are the Jacobite ...”

“... best ever argument for believing in the immortality of the soul – shook the world of Johnson and Boswell. It leads directly to the Economists’ Creed, courageously formulated by Keynes: in the long run, we are all dead. To the economists, nothing is real, not the soul or society or the species or nature; only desire embodied in money. That then resolves ...”

“... sources; and Malone whose editorial encouragement and insistence finally coaxed his friend Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Life of Johnson into shape and into print. In the hands of this apparently diffident Irishman, the practice of literary history changed for ever: as far as the privileging of meticulous textual scholarship and ...”

“... once got it nearly right. Certainly Dr Johnson thought so. Shortly after he had been involved by Boswell in a long correspondence on the subject of entails, on which Boswell was quarrelling with his father, Johnson told Mrs Thrale that an entail did not indicate ‘a preference of the land to its owner’ but ‘the ...”

“... pulpit. It does contain subtleties, even in the brass section, but it’s seldom averse to a yell. James Hogg could sound polished when he felt like it, but he was thought noisy by the aspiring Edinburgh gentry. They were eager for lessons in belletristic politeness, and knew he could be vulgar and uncouth. He knew they knew it, too. Hogg was a ...”

“... of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.’ Thus Henry James in the Preface to The Aspern Papers, the germ of which was the story of an American Shelley-worshipper seeking out the eighty-year old Claire Clairmont to trick or wheedle her into handing over precious documents illuminating her youthful relations with ...”

“... According to Boswell, Johnson was so hostile to gesticulation that ‘when another gentleman thought he was giving additional force to what he uttered, by expressive movements of his hands, Johnson fairly seized them and held them down.’ But in restraining someone else’s gestures, he himself gestured; he gave additional force to his opinion by expressive movements of his hands ...”

“... which Larkin himself seems to have thoroughly approved of, and quotes in a letter, was by Clive James in his collection The Metropolitan Critic. ‘Just now and again James says something really penetrating: “originality is not an ingredient of poetry, it is poetry” – I’ve been feeling that for years.’ This ...”

“... Brightman is not murderous at all, but detailed, exigent, measured, beady-eyed. Nor is she a Boswell, however. She may have become an accepted figure in the McCarthy landscape in the years leading up to McCarthy’s death in 1989, interviewing and taking notes, but she proves tough-minded and independent to a degree. The tone is one of unforgiving ...”

“... men who made London culture in his lifetime in being a native – Johnson and Garrick, Smollett, Boswell and Samuel Richardson were all incomers. Uglow makes telling use of Hogarth’s progress across the capital, from Smithfield to Covent Garden, from the city to ‘the town’ and from trade to art. Not that the distance between the latter was so great. In ...”