“... point to the frequency of such reversals in Swift; in his dealings with Esther Johnson and Mrs Dingley, even while ‘establishing for himself a fantasy family in which he might act father, brother, lover or husband as he chose’, Swift ‘was also reversing the old relationship which once made him dependent upon two women’. Reversing is ...”

“... with the corrections and illustrations of Various Commentators; To which are added notes by Sam. Johnson. This edition, with its much reprinted preface and doggedly commonsensical approach to the text, still exerts a palpable influence on Shakespeare scholars: Jonathan Bate’s introduction to this new edition of the Complete Works makes regular appeals to ...”

“... When Samuel Johnson, travelling in the Highlands with James Boswell, reaches Loch Ness, he is so overwhelmed by the massiveness of the landscape that the heavy order of his prose is briefly disarrayed. On his right, there are high and steep rocks, and on his left deep water laps against the bank in ‘gentle agitation ...”

“... everywhere else as “license”, is called in England by the august name of “liberty”.’ Samuel Johnson would make the point still clearer in his essay ‘The Bravery of the English Common Soldiers’. Why is it, he asked, that the ‘English vulgar’ make such excellent soldiers, willing to follow wherever their officers lead? It was not, he ...”

“... ham actors the lot of them, with decayed teeth and rasping voices. Casanova laments his lot to Samuel Johnson. He is a vividly seedy lover, Johnson a polysyllabic agony uncle; and around them whirls a cast of women for sale, rapacious aunts and mothers, and gentlemen bartering their mistresses over tea. Casanova ...”

“... developed the concept of a new national dictionary that would supplant the pioneering work of Samuel Johnson, and rival the efforts of 19th-century European lexicographers. Peter Gilliver, in The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016), characterises the movement that led to the formalisation of the Philological Society’s proposals as ‘a ...”

“... entities known as ideas, which is one of the least creditable reasons to admire Cobbett, Orwell or Samuel Johnson. If they aren’t able to extricate the man or woman ‘behind’ the work, they tend to feel a little cheated. Their fondness for biography, a superior version of what the media know as ‘human interest’, goes hand in hand with their ...”

“... of interpretation. Bloom, as I said, calls himself an experiential critic. He wants to do what Samuel Johnson did so well in the Lives of the Poets, which is to record his own experience of literature in immediate and fairly personal terms, unconstrained by a lot of fancy theorising. His readings succeed in casting brilliant light on classic works ...”

“... Derrida’s elaborate readings of Kafka, Geoffrey Hartman’s of Christopher Smart, or Barbara Johnson’s of Zora Neale Hurston, to see how much analysis of text and modification of the canon have gone into deconstructive theorising. But why should Steiner, who wants to replace commentary with ‘performance answering performance’, suddenly insist on ...”

“... Perhaps the fallacy that links sound with sense, persuasively demolished two hundred years ago by Samuel Johnson, is set to reappear on the ‘agenda for the 1990s’: if so, we can look forward to some lively intellectual disagreements. In the names Bate quotes, the ‘r’ in ‘Striding Edge’ is to my ear more urgently pedestrian than rugged; and in ...”

“... about what does and doesn’t make sense for me from a business standpoint. One of the most famous Samuel Johnson quotations has it that nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of being hung in a fortnight. I am able to bring a similar concentration to lesser tribulations: toothache, tax bills, the loss of friends. Thoughts about oneself – in ...”

“... on foreign words throughout the 18th century, especially words from French: this is the time when Samuel Johnson also was worrying that English speakers were starting ‘to babble a dialect of France’. Incorporation of foreign words into a language can be a sign of its lack of vocabulary (Cicero thought Latin needed to borrow from Greek), of its ...”

“... pre-Romantic aesthetics, the typical is a far more compelling matter than the individual. Just as Samuel Johnson could not enjoy a literary work he judged morally repugnant, so he thought the individual trifling and rather tedious compared to the universal. He just couldn’t see the point of particularity. Hegel, too, praised the typical; but by this he ...”

“... sociability, she meets and describes many of the characters of the age. She is befriended by Samuel Johnson and passes the days in Mrs Thrale’s coterie at Streatham. She records the bluestocking salons of Elizabeth Montagu (material for some savage vignettes in The Witlings). Garrick frequently turns up at the Burney home in Leicester Fields to ...”

“... leaving us the traces of both original irritation and original inspiration. In his Life of Pope, Samuel Johnson told a story that has fixed Pope’s masochistic appetite for the mockery and abuse which were the lot of the embattled satirist. Johnson had heard the son of Pope’s friend Jonathan Richardson give an ...”