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“... for constitutional and financial benefits, and culminated in the creation of the yeomanry. The Goldsmith Court Minute Book leaves no doubt as to the true nature of the episode. I suggested in my book that in the 1630s the City was more favourable to the Royal plan for rebuilding St Paul’s than to the radical Puritan Feoffees of Impropriation. Ashton ...”

“... health’ when Johnson first came to Streatham after the Thrales found him ‘on his knees before John Delap, an Anglican clergyman and minor playwright, “beseeching God to continue him in the use of his understanding”’ in terms so ‘pathetic’ that Henry Thrale ‘involuntarily lifted up one hand to shut his mouth, from provocation at hearing a man ...”

“... of Sir William Loraine. Brown’s father had been Loraine’s land agent and his elder brother John became the estate surveyor. Brown’s father died when Lancelot was only four, but means had been found to keep him at school until he was 16, possibly with the help of the Loraines, after which he went as an apprentice to the head gardener at Kirkharle. It ...”

“... identity distinct from the British, the very fathers of the Republic themselves – Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson – conceived of themselves, at least up to 1776, as Englishmen who happened to live overseas. How could they have thought otherwise? From these pages there rises a weird yearning. Davie, in his modern self-exile, joins in his ...”

“... it ‘the one Irish century that escaped from darkness and confusion’. Swift, Berkeley, Burke, Goldsmith and Sheridan: all these stood for clarity of thought, while Dublin gaiety, Belfast liberalism, and the sense of national consequence acquired at Dungannon, all contributed something to the Yeatsian image of a mellow era. That this particular form of ...”

“... Front’s 168 candidates secured an average vote of 8.9 per cent. During a Commons debate in July, John Stokes, the Conservative MP for Halesowen and Stourbridge, a former admirer of General Franco and a supporter of the Monday Club, pointed to the growing constituency for the National Front and insisted that ‘a date must soon be fixed beyond which no ...”

“... published in Colombo in 1900, Sinclair briskly sketches a career that had some parallels with John Clare (an elective Scot when the humour took him). Born in 1832, there was a mean village upbringing; a book-hungry lad leaving school at 12 years of age and commencing his education, ‘such as it was and is’. Sinclair describes a farming family of ...”

“... group of old men who gripe about the world and imply the poet’s descent from Burke, Berkeley, Goldsmith, Swift: ‘four great minds that hated Whiggery’. This might be Dr Johnson calling Bathurst ‘a very good hater’ because ‘he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig’: Yeats is trying out right-wing animus in an 18th-century guise. But the markers of ...”

“... contains innumerable engaging asides – for example, the allusion to an old servant, known to John Aubrey, who had at his fingertips a complete history of England’s kings in ballad form. He is good on the vicissitudes of the old folk tale, which aroused deprecation, during the rational 18th century, on account of its outlandish elements (we find ...”

“... where his sister lived. In 1473 he married his daughter, Caterinella, to Bernardo Casalayna, a goldsmith, and in the same year delivered his only public commission for Messina, a polyptych or many-panelled altarpiece for the church of San Gregorio, the central panel of which is the first of his works to be legibly signed and dated. It seems certain he had ...”

“... Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the artist – James William ...”

“... of how a degree-less provincial could match university-educated courtly playwrights such as John Lyly at their own game. The other writer, however, dealt with French current affairs and the social position of education in a different manner: GUISE: My Lord of Anjou, there are a hundred Protestants Which we have chased into the river Seine That swim ...”

“... words he wrote. At which point, Jim turned to the bench and declared: ‘Your Honour, like Oliver Goldsmith, Dean Swift, Edmund Burke, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett, I occasionally have difficulties with the ...”

“... protective suavity, the counterfeit of impeccable logic or a minute calibration of fashion. John Berryman once said to a friend: ‘Doesn ‘t reading Stendhal make you feel intelligent!’ The same is true of Hazlitt; and the justified praise of Paulin’s book is that the compliment to our amour-propre survives his exploration to a generous ...”

“... illusion that Burke was the lackey of the rich and powerful. From first to last, he stuck up for John Wilkes and the cause of liberty. He drily recognised Wilkes’s failings: ‘There has been no hero of the mob but Wilkes’; ‘He is not ours, and if he were, is little to be trusted. He is a lively agreeable man, but of no prudence and no ...”