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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... academicisation of literature in our time. Its two predecessors, The Imaginary Library (1982) and Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (first published in 1987 as Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson), which were issued by a different publisher, were less sourly jokey and less apocalyptic. The first ...”

“... his integrity. The career of Richard Crossman refuted these stereotypes rather in the manner that Samuel Johnson, by stubbing his foot against a rock, claimed to refute Berkeley: what was lost as a formal exercise was pure gain as an object lesson. For Crossman remained incorrigibly attached to the habits and training of an academic milieu without ever ...”

“... did not always reflect superb teaching in schools and universities. When James Boswell showed Samuel Johnson his Latin thesis, the doctor shook his head at the many solecisms and remarked: ‘Ruddiman is dead, sir, Ruddiman is dead.’ He knew that the high quality of the Latin dissertations previously submitted to the Society of Advocates in ...”

“... As Shakespeare’s reputation grew he had to become hardworking and lovable, too. So in 1765 Samuel Johnson appended to Rowe’s life the story that when young Will was doing time as the early modern equivalent of a car-park attendant, looking after playgoers’ horses outside a London theatre, ‘he became so conspicuous for his care and ...”