“... 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 ...”

“... and timeless. Smith bangs away at the lavish veneration post-war critics have bestowed on Samuel Johnson as a great authoritative grammarian of written English. There’s plainly a controversial aspect to what both are doing, but also a welcome constructiveness. Publishers are flooding the market with rival interpretations, quick to write and ...”

“... husband in Suffolk – she enjoyed turning pupils’ names into riddles for the weekly newsletter. Samuel Johnson said this sort of writing was a waste of her ‘early cultivation’ and precocity, but it endeared countless boys to her for the rest of their lives. Names matter to women partly because theirs change in adulthood more often than ...”

“... Wind contends that Reynolds can be aligned with the heroic, noble, Roman, grand-style figure of Samuel Johnson: a believer, albeit a troubled one. Hume, on the other hand, underwrites the art of Gainsborough – in his naturalness, distrust of the grandiose, bent towards particularity and rejection of authority. This is not argued through with great ...”

“... could enjoy reproductions of pictures scattered throughout Europe.’ We hear the Whig politician Samuel Romilly remembering how the Soho parlour of his tradesman father was a little gallery, ‘elegantly adorned’ with ‘the beautiful prints of Vivares, Bartolozzi or Strange, from the pictures of Claude, Caracci, Raphael and Correggio’. Engravers arrived ...”

“... that they fail to see in it a reflection of the particular social conditions of modernity. For Samuel Johnson, it was the socially typical which was imaginatively enthralling, and aberration which was boring. Johnson had a proudly populist trust in the robustness of routine meanings, and saw language as embodying ...”

“... Samuel Johnson would not have had the term ‘Curlism’ in mind when he expressed regret that, even as his dictionary was being printed, ‘some words are budding, and some falling away.’ Yet it is a good enough instance of the shifts that Johnson deplored. ‘Bowdlerism’ still survives in the vocabulary of publishing to denote prudish expurgation; Curlism, which meant the opposite (and more besides), was already fading from the language when the figure who inspired the term, the flamboyant bookseller Edmund Curll, had been dead for less than a decade ...”

“... as well as its administration. It was because patriotism was so often a synonym for dissent that Samuel Johnson coined his crusty definition of it for his dictionary. But by the 1850s the meaning of patriotism for many Britons was what Lord Palmerston and not what Richard Cobden wanted it to be. Patriotism was no longer the last resort of the ...”

“... Principal and professors of the university of St Andrews, on their superb treat to Dr. Samuel Johnson’. When Fergusson rounds on his former teachers he subjects their Scotophobic guest to a linguistic as well as a culinary drubbing as the famous definer of oats is made to eat his words. Fergusson wants the great lexicographer to be ...”

“... inadequacy and indulgence in the sin of acedia, lingered into the 18th century. Spacks cites Samuel Johnson in particular as one whose ethical conservatism formed his conviction that the world owed him no amusement. For Johnson, interest was for the individual to supply for himself out of his own intellectual and ...”

“... wounds ... If things get worse tomorrow, tomorrow we will devise other stratagems.’ According to Samuel Johnson, his friend Savage manifested a comparable ingenuity in distorted ratiocination: ‘Savage ... did not suffer his esteem of himself to depend upon others ... he contented himself with the applause of men of judgment; and was somewhat disposed ...”

“... at in a verse translation, leaving aside the genre known as ‘Imitation’, in which poets like Samuel Johnson, Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell have done such marvellous things. A verse translation may aim to be an independent modern work in its own right. Or, I ought rather to say, this is what some famous and admired translations have in fact been. If ...”

“... us from the Latinate culture that spawned figures as diverse as Milton, Hobbes and (at its end) Samuel Johnson. The waning of humanistic education in the 18th century, and the later separation of the modern academic disciplines, has made Utopia doubly distant and difficult. Without a knowledge of the categories More was manipulating, we are left with ...”

“... confirming him as the implacable opponent of monarchical power in government. He became, in Samuel Johnson’s words, ‘the man who has divided the kingdom with Caesar, so that it was a doubt whether the nation should be ruled by the sceptre of George III or the tongue of Fox’. Then in 1788 came the King’s bout of madness, when Fox’s ...”

“... not despite their wickedness but because of it. Rochester is finally redeemed, but the puritanical Samuel Richardson extends no such mercy to the dastardly Lovelace, and the aristocrats of the Gothic novel are by and large more predatory than enticing. Like sexuality itself, the nobility is both attractive and alarming. In his biography of the real-life ...”