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“... a million words kept melancholy on the boil rather than evaporating it. And what of the melancholy Samuel Johnson (‘mad all my life, at least not sober’), for whom the imposed solitariness of composition bred compulsions and collapse, the dread of madness and damnation? Screech suggests how Montaigne confronted melancholy and went about curing himself ...”

“... or the future, predominate over the present, ‘advances us in the dignity of human beings,’ Samuel Johnson wrote. ‘That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plains of Marathon, or whose enthusiasm would not grow warmer among the ruins of Rome.’ Rome had another effect altogether on Thomas Cole, the ...”

“... the works from 1720 to 1762 and was succeeded by Robert Mylne, designer (to the great disgust of Samuel Johnson) of Blackfriars Bridge. Mylne seems to have started the tradition, which spread to the other London water companies, that the engineer was also the commercial manager. He died in 1811 aged 78, and was succeeded by his son William Chadwell ...”

“... argument. Like many before him (Leavis, for one), Trotter believes that the common reader as Samuel Johnson conceived of him and relied on him was already disappearing from the scene by the time Johnson died. Trotter strikes out on his own by pondering the significance in this respect of a figure like ...”

“... the problem by redefining honour as a strictly internal moral quality. In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson wished that society was not so ‘refined’ as to consider an affront to one’s honour a serious injury. But, alas, it did. ‘He, then, who fights a duel,’ Johnson observed, ‘does not fight from ...”

“... Religion, an exercise in Newtonian natural theology in the style pioneered by the Reverends Samuel Clarke, Richard Bentley and other pious Boyle Lecturers, but this attempt to appear in the person of a metaphysical moralist was largely ignored. All authors are sad after composition, but finishing a book made Cheyne physically sick. Late in his life, he ...”

“... his choice of me to take care of his posthumous writings.’ So what about ‘Stella’: Esther Johnson, a girl of eight when Swift first met her in Temple’s household in 1689, thought by credible witnesses to be Swift’s secret wife, even (though this really looks like a canard) the mother of his child? For Damrosch, the real centre of Swift’s ...”

“... his history of Anglophone criticism. The ideology of the critic as authority, with antecedents in Samuel Johnson and in those arbiters of taste, the Romantic bookmen, reached its apogee in the Victorian sages, who, as Parrinder notes, were actuated by a ‘missionary’ impulse to serve as the enforcers of a new order of cultural coherence based on ...”

“... dined together. Then after some prayers Doughty knelt to the block, and his head was struck off. Samuel Johnson, one of the very few men to look on Drake with a cold eye, says of this trial, in which it was alleged that the ‘plot’ had been concocted in Plymouth: ‘How far it is probable ... that Doughty, who is represented as a man of eminent ...”

“... hit the stands in the autumn of 1743, making The New Dunciad old hat after barely eighteen months, Samuel Richardson grumbled in a letter to his friend and sometime client of his printing house, the poet and cultural factotum Aaron Hill, that ‘I have bought Mr Pope over so often, and his Dunciad so lately before his last new-vampt one, that I am tir’d of ...”

“... Once regarded as among the most distinguished poets in England, admired by Johnson, envied by Goldsmith, praised by Wordsworth, and read by everyone, Anna Letitia Barbauld has this last century or two thoroughly sunk into oblivion. Until recently, all that was remembered about her was an anecdote in Coleridge’s Table Talk, in which she figured, ingloriously, as the stooge whose miscomprehension of The Ancient Mariner provoked his comparison between that poem and the tale in the Arabian Nights of the genie, the merchant and the date shells ...”

“... borrowed promiscuously from French to expand English’s range of expression, prompting Samuel Johnson to warn that too much translation risked shaking the foundations of English. Since no book ‘was ever turned from one language into another, without imparting something of its native idiom’, translators’ ‘mischievous and comprehensive ...”

“... his home, daydreaming about a ‘pretty wench’ he’d spotted in Westminster earlier that day, Samuel Pepys became so aroused that he ejaculated spontaneously, having ‘it complete avec la fille … without my hand’, as he recorded complacently in his diary, the ‘first time I did make trial of my strength of fancy of that kind’. The pride was that ...”

“... an affair and using any form of written communication at all is rank idiocy. Long before Freud, Samuel Johnson suggested that the impression of artless intimacy given by letters could be a sham. ‘There is indeed no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse … A friendly letter is a calm ...”

“... lexicographer) the views that Mr Burchfield expressed in his Preface to the 1979 reprinting of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, which he praised for ‘its sturdy Englishness – American vocabulary, for example, is almost all deliberately excluded.’ Those are hardly the words of a uniter of ‘two nations divided by a common language’: the doctrine implied is ...”