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“... I draw Miltonic Air. This affable performance goes on for 278 lines. It failed to amuse Dr Johnson, but it has some characteristic jokes: Whether Inviegling Hymen has trapanned The unwary youth, and ty’d the Gordian Knot Of jangling Wedlock, indissoluble; Worried all day by loud Xantippes Din, And when the gentle Dew of sleep inclines With slumbrous ...”

“... neither of Kennedy’s immediate successors served what should have been their normal terms – Johnson repudiating a life of successful power-brokering and exiling himself to Texas to avoid what he was certain would be defeat in the race for a second term, and Nixon eluding impeachment by a hair. The two decent men who followed, Ford and Carter, seemed ...”

“... constant nursing, first from Russell, then from a long succession of others including W.E. Johnson, Frank Ramsey, Keynes, Moore, Sraffa, Norman Malcolm and finally, literally, from Dr Bevan and his family, who took him into their home and cared for him during his final illness. It is amazing to think of those ...”

“... but continued with the motorcade, had lunch as planned at the Trade Mart, went on to Austin and Johnson’s ranch; went shooting with Johnson the following morning. For various reasons, this story is more real than anything else in the novel; an eloquent and moving representation of our disbelief. For the rest, in the ...”

“... An Adventure of Master Tommy Trusty; and his delivering Miss Biddy Johnson, from the Thieves who were going to murder her’: this is the charming title of a story in the first-ever children’s periodical, the Lilliputian Magazine, brought out by John Newbery in 1751, and with its theme of character-moulding (a silly little girl is cured of vanity through suffering a fright) it set the tone for a good deal of juvenile magazine fiction for some time ...”

“... of a bizarre, error-riddled two-thousand-word blogpost which served only to show how rattled the Johnson administration had been by the piece. The book is essentially a longer sequel to that initial exposé, which in all important points overlaps with the critique launched by the joint health and social care and science and technology committees: ‘one of ...”

“... a common misuse of the term ‘metaphor’, and Ricks perhaps took himself to be showing a frank charm in telling it, but its wit is sour. Ricks’s forte is identifying effective poetry, and explaining why it works. In his chapter on David Ferry, he discusses ‘The Lesson’, Ferry’s touching adaptation of a poem Samuel ...”

“... only real setback came in the London mayoral election of 2000, when the official Labour candidate, Frank Dobson, finished a distant third. But the fact that the runaway winner was Ken Livingstone, who stood as an independent but was in effect the alternative Labour candidate (and became the official Labour candidate in 2004), shows the extent of the party’s ...”

“... about an unprecedented – and still unmatched – mobilisation of scientists in support of Lyndon Johnson. To promote their cause in broadcasts and newspaper ads, they raised more than $500,000, a respectable sum in those early days of political mega-spending. But the Johnson landslide produced morning-after remorse among ...”

“... calls for correction, and, though quite firm in their treatment of other scholars, they avoid what Johnson called ‘the acrimony of a scholiast’ and generally preserve a civil tone. ‘No edition of Shakespeare can or should be definitive ... Our own edition ... is inevitably not only fallible but arbitrary.’ Gary Taylor’s General Introduction carefully ...”

“... Aristophanes’ – in both cases rather flatteringly – Foote included among his fans Dr Johnson (‘For a broad laugh I must confess the scoundrel has no fellow’) and Edward Gibbon, who told his sister in a letter: ‘When I am tired of the Roman Empire I can laugh away an evening at Foote’s theatre.’ Yet he died, said Garrick, excusing ...”

“... life has radically altered. Actual behavioural change is more difficult to assess. Masters and Johnson and their colleague Robert Kolodny argue in Crisis that sexual behaviour in the United States among both homosexuals and heterosexuals has not yet altered enough to make a significant difference. In addition to the time-lapse between infection and the ...”

“... about Carlyle with both authority and imagination is a daunting enterprise. For one thing, Dr Johnson apart, no English man of letters has ever held a higher opinion of the dignity of biography as a literary form, or inferentially expected more from its practitioners. Carlyle’s most famous dictum, ‘History is the essence of innumerable ...”

“... for the Yellow Book. Housman was six years older than Yeats and eight years older than Lionel Johnson, but they were much more dependent than he was on the work of the Victorian era, and it was the novelty of his tone which set him apart. The moment of the break-up of existing verse-forms, with Pound and his associates, still lay ahead. Housman was not ...”

“... the maladroit interference of Harold Watkinson, the Transport Minister, and the intransigence of Frank Cousins, the TGWU leader: it was the first great set-piece battle between a union and the government. Shepherd brings this out well but misses altogether the significance of the strike which stands, as we look back, at the very centre of our recent social ...”