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“... luvvies; it began with quite serious purposes and ambitions. With his rancorous first biographer, John Hawkins (Johnson coined the term ‘unclubbable’ for Hawkins, who after a few years, was ostracised from the Turk’s Head), Johnson had already founded the Ivy Lane Club, which ran for several years but broke up around 1756. The new club was a rather ...”

“... novels of the 1720s were noisily disparaged by canonical pioneers of the genre such as Samuel Richardson (though Richardson neglected to add that in his professional, book-trade capacity he had printed some of her steamiest works, including the bestselling Love in Excess). The quiet absorption by later 18th-century ...”

“... skimps on some important details, and leaves others out entirely. For these, you can consult John Kercher’s book, Meredith, a memoir of his daughter and a passionate indictment of Knox and Sollecito. Kercher tells us that when Sollecito was first questioned about the knife with Meredith’s DNA on it, he said that it must have been left there after ...”

“... cent of the population had been born in the New Commonwealth. The National Front’s candidate, John Fairhurst, had stood in nearby Hayes and Harlington in the two 1974 elections. He wasn’t standing in Southall in the hope of securing a high vote, but because the NF thought putting up a candidate there would get them publicity. On 23 April, 2875 police ...”

“... her of robes and jewels, sob and swoon. ‘The great business of painting,’ declared Jonathon Richardson the elder, echoing almost all earlier European writers on art from Alberti onwards, ‘is to relate a history or fable’ – to compete with the poet or dramatist, and best of all with epic and tragedy. The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Delaroche ...”

“... a marauding Danish general, kicked his head around in triumph. Conversely, the public hanging of John Platts outside Derby County Jail in April 1847 drew a crowd of twenty thousand – descendants of the ‘seething mob’ that played Shrove Tuesday football. When the FA was founded in 1863 it knew it was in direct competition for crowd support with public ...”

“... of Cicero and other classical masters. Those nervous or incapable of writing like this, could, as Richardson had discovered to his profit early in his publishing career, purchase volumes of model letters in English, replete with flourishes and sentiments often alien to the sender, but part nevertheless of the rhetorical currency required for any respectable ...”

“... and Farm-Poultry as emergency sources of income when his farm was doing badly. They are, as Mark Richardson drily observes, ‘surely the best poultry-stories written by a modern American poet’, but they are less about the hens than the reputations of their owners. This is not the moralist’s New England of isolated farmsteads eking out a proud, solitary ...”

“... praise of the English constitution in The Spirit of the Laws, like Diderot’s for Samuel Richardson (‘O Richardson, Richardson ... I will keep you on the same shelf with Moses, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles’) caused French hearts to beat even faster. A steady supply of ...”

“... to have left him a parting gift: a small compass that William’s most recent biographer, Robert Richardson, takes as a hint that her lover orient himself in her direction.* This may be over-reading – William was an enthusiastic hiker – but the temptation is understandable: both before the marriage and for more than 30 years afterwards, she is the fixed ...”

“... pausing for pathos or innuendo, or reaching for the next surprise – renders this liveliness. Richardson called his epistolary method ‘writing to the moment’; Sterne’s was a comparable dedication of the novel’s resources to life’s momentariness. Though he seems consciously to have brought Tristram Shandy to an end after Volume IX (its fifth ...”

“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who ...”

“... Jane Miller, who quotes this as one of the ‘views which men need women to have’, cites John Stuart Mill with equal pertinence: ‘We are perpetually told that women are better than men, by those who are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as good.’ She admires Clarissa for its seductive subtlety and humour, and to what degree ...”

“... to have been the fleeting ten thousand. Nor did he fail them. Bubbling with pride, he once told John Mortimer in a Sunday Times interview about the prostitutes he had known: ‘I treated them with consideration and like a gentleman. I always let them have their pleasure first. And of course I was enough of a connoisseur to know if their pleasure was ...”

“... are not Russian transplants, but Californians seen in their native habitat. We begin and end with John, an upwardly-mobile computer scientist whose work is connected (just how is never made clear) with nuclear weapons manufacture. At the age of 26, John belatedly realises that he is a workaholic with no private ...”