“... 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 ...”

“... has its roots in the New Critics’ preoccupation with the metaphysical poets, and what Samuel Johnson called their yoking together of heterogeneous ideas by violence, but it also reflects the attitudes of someone trained to believe that bread is flesh and God. Donoghue’s main claims are that metaphor ‘invokes things disgracefully far ...”

“... The watch system meant that no one got a complete night’s sleep anyway. It was easy to see why Samuel Johnson thought that a sailor’s life was like being in jail with the chance of being drowned. I wrote home regularly and my mother kept my letters. Reading them sixty years later, I feel intense embarrassment. The writer’s views on politics and ...”

“... heavens is hard to accept, and the belief that there is a divine logic to our sufferings roused Samuel Johnson to his finest diatribe, the review of Soame Jenyns’s ‘Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil’, extracted here by Enright. ‘Many a merry bout have these frolic beings at the vicissitudes of an ague, and good sport it is to see ...”

“... Oscar Wilde called experience the name one gives to one’s mistakes, while for Samuel Johnson it was what hope triumphed over for those who married a second time. Emerson thought all experience was valuable, an opinion not shared by the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay. Plato and Spinoza saw it as a realm of illusion, to be contrasted with the pure light of reason ...”

“... isn’t always such a bad thing after all. If good dinners pass away, so do tyrants and toothache. Samuel Johnson regarded all change as a great evil, whereas Brecht seemed to see the sheer fact of change, as opposed to particular unpleasant instances of it, as inherently comic. In one of his fables, Herr Keuner returns to his native village after a ...”

“... Kierkegaard wrote, ‘we suggest that it is simultaneously forgotten yet preserved.’ Samuel Johnson said that ‘forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance,’ and Johnny Cash sang, ‘I forgot to remember to forget.’ That forgetting is a way of remembrance is the idea which recurs throughout Heller-Roazen’s book, appearing again and ...”

“... spirit; but not all artists have viewed their trade in this high-minded manner. Jonathan Swift or Samuel Johnson would have been dismayed by this grandiose inflation of their literary hackwork. And who knows how Aeschylus or the author of Beowulf regarded their craft? It would be rash to assume that they thought of it in the same way Shelley did. Not all ...”

“... dwarf and cripple’. It also left him increasingly dependent on the ministrations of women, as Samuel Johnson (another victim of his wet nurse) recorded in his Life of Pope in 1781, drawing on the testimony of ‘a female domestick’ who had known Pope ‘perhaps after the middle of life’:He was then so weak as to stand in perpetual need of female ...”

“... the inability of your father to put on his trousers in a hurry. ‘Nothing odd will do long,’ Samuel Johnson said, judging Tristram Shandy to be the success of a passing season. Johnson had the Enlightenment faith in generality, against which Sterne’s graph of character seemed merely eccentric. For once ...”

“... all necessitated by the different truths they are trying to share with us. The narrator of ‘Samuel Johnson is Indignant: that Scotland has so few trees’ (that’s the title and the whole story) is a very different person from the lover of gardens and doctors who worries over herself in ‘Thyroid Diary’ and compares herself to the perpetually ...”

“... the pairing of Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer – I started to stumble. It may seem notable that, say, Samuel Johnson and David Garrick set off together to conquer London from Lichfield, or that Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne were once classmates in Aix, but it’s not clear that such coincidences demand joint biographies, let alone overarching ...”