“... 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 ...”

“... are, they agree it’s best if he doesn’t black up. Of Cato’s triumphant first night in 1713, Samuel Johnson wrote unkindly: ‘The Whigs applauded every line in which liberty was mentioned, as a satire on the Tories; and the Tories echoed every clap, to show that the satire was unfelt.’ Oakeshott’s revival is similarly supported by what ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... remark: ‘Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because she rose from stinking Ooze?’ Or even Samuel Johnson. If women’s writing were taken into account, would it change the way we read and judge the poetry of an era long assumed to be magisterially Augustan and masculine? In her passionate and wide-ranging study of 18th-century women’s ...”

“... our sex ought to endeavour to attain in the world.’ Six years before Wollstonecraft was born, Samuel Johnson had remarked, at once facetiously and in earnest, on the rise of ‘a generation of Amazons of the pen, who … have set masculine tyranny at defiance, asserted their claim to the regions of science, and seem resolved to contest the ...”

“... baits his hook,/And takes their cash – but where’s the book?’ as Charles Churchill said of Samuel Johnson in a similar case). Gray even claimed that Voltaire would have been hanged for forging banknotes if he hadn’t left England in an unexplained hurry. Decades later, on a pilgrimage to Ferney, Voltaire’s retreat outside Geneva, James Boswell ...”

“... do not list it, but my attention was recently drawn to the word maund, which my informant said Samuel Johnson had taken up from the dialect collections of the naturalist John Ray. I looked up maund in Johnson’s Dictionary. It is defined very concisely, as ‘a hand ...”

“... air of drudgery that has surrounded lexicography since the time of Lemprière’s fellow alumnus Samuel Johnson, by inventing for his hero a series of mind-bogglingly lurid adventures. London, not Oxford, is the scene of our protagonist’s literary efforts, and the sinister Nazim, official assassin to the Nawab of the Carnatic – one of the many ...”

“... that this is a country of the mind, constructed on principles no different from those of the Samuel Johnson who devised, for the Abyssinia of Rasselas, just representations of general truths and a common humanity. From Abyssinia Kapuściński passed to Persia. From Rasselas, as it were, to Ozymandias. Present in the second book as the occupant of an ...”

“... from each other. She found one in the mind of Hester Thrale’s eldest daughter – observing Samuel Johnson in According to Queeney – and another in the Antarctic of Scott’s famous expedition. Five people told that tale, in The Birthday Boys, but they were all Beryl. On a good day, a novelist will find little parts of himself everywhere in ...”

“... with a quotation from Boscoe Pertwee: ‘I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure.’ Samuel Johnson warned people not to make jokes at their own expense because others will use them seriously. I am impressed and excited by the great sweep of development over the centuries so far as the understanding of mind in science is concerned: but ...”

“... not calculated to appeal to a wider audience. ‘Goldsmith is writing a Natural History,’ Samuel Johnson said to Boswell, ‘and you can be sure that he will make it as entertaining as a Persian Tale.’ So he did, turning naturally to Buffon for his material and method. Like the Histoire naturelle, Oliver Goldsmith’s History of the Earth and ...”

“... from the vicious exercises of the Lunar world to serving the urbanities of Fanny Burney and Samuel Johnson. Sometimes, Lunar women got their own back: one subverted Withering’s strenuous fungus hunts by painting on field mushrooms, then handing over the surprisingly coloured results to the easily fooled naturalist. Fashion mattered almost as much ...”

“... There was only one other person in the life of Samuel Johnson who stood a chance of writing a biography as entertaining as Boswell’s. Francis Barber was overqualified by modern standards, and too loyal for the job in any era, but for more than thirty years he was Johnson’s (black) manservant ...”

“... Stumbling​ out of the pouring rain on the Isle of Skye, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson found a welcome in the house of Allan MacDonald at Kingsburgh. Dr Johnson had developed a nasty cold; Boswell was wet and thirsty and delighted to get indoors. ‘There was a comfortable parlour,’ he wrote in his journal in the autumn of 1773, ‘with a good fire, and a dram of admirable Hollands gin went round ...”