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“... and entertain them with the softnesses of Love.’ He didn’t mean this as a compliment. When Dr Johnson invented the ‘metaphysical poets’ as a category, he objected along similar lines: The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing ...”

“... or the directors. I send them thank you notes and good wishes, and today comes a lovely card from Martin Freeman, whom I don’t know, but who is so good about the monologue he did (A Chip in the Sugar) that I want to write back and thank him, thus making it like an extract from A Lady of Letters, a thank you letter for a thank you letter. I’m so pleased ...”

“... Christ Church London. Members of the advisory board include the Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson; the failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who called the 6 January insurrection an ‘inside job’; the former Australian prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott; the Blue Labour founder, Maurice Glasman, who attended Trump’s ...”

“... a pity that James, who can talk with such trenchancy and sense about everything from Mandelstam to Martin Amis, makes such a fool of himself (and of us) when he touches on the literature of his birthplace. His recent overview of Australian poetry in the Times Literary Supplement shows him at his worst – uninformed and wallowing. Even when he affects to ...”

“... not the other. Kathleen Raine and Ruth Pitter cannot be found in O’Brien, but Elma Mitchell and Martin Bell cannot be found in Armitage and Crawford. Elma Mitchell’s ‘Thoughts after Ruskin’ is a revelation, and to put her in is to do exactly the sort of thing anthologies are meant to do: extend the terrain as they go over it. These books are also ...”

“... politicians mingled freely at the Mitre and Mermaid clubs and at the taverns associated with them. Martin Butler has demonstrated the prominence of playgoing in the shaping and sustaining of the political outlook of the Caroline gentry. Beneath that social level, as one would never guess from the standard social histories of the period, huge audiences watched ...”

“... there had been ‘nothing like it since Inigo Jones’. The great American modernist Philip Johnson praised its ‘distinction’ in the Architectural Review. Local people disliked it, possibly because, as the Smithsons thought, they were unsophisticated but without doubt because the combination of glass façades and inadequate underfloor heating meant ...”

“... good with pilaff, and can darn cotton socks like crazy.’ Indiscreet praise is still slander. Martin Samson says, endeavouring to ‘introduce’ The Ambassadors, that ‘the main purpose of an introduction, as usually written, seems to be the statement of a critical opinion of the literary work concerned. Possibly the best place for such an opinion would ...”

“... gave up on these struggles or even went over to the dark side, such as Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. ‘The useful idiots of the empire’, ‘the empire loyalists’, ‘the belligerati’: Ali’s contempt has the fluency of someone who has taken part in factional battles for decades. Hitchens is a particular target, for supporting the invasion of ...”

“... emphasis.Karl’s verbal snapshots, I soon and lastingly learned, were a wonder of the world. R.W. Johnson was in those days writing a series of super-forthright, abrasive pieces that often featured glancing dismissals of all sorts of senior Labour Party figures. One of these pieces had come in and been edited by Mary-Kay, and Karl was reading it in ...”

“... When​ Doctor Johnson defined a club as ‘an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions’ he did not mention the essential condition – that each member shall assume that every other member is a good fellow. In practice, of course, it is a law of club life the world over that, apart from very small clubs indeed, no member can know every other member even by sight ...”

“... the ‘Christian’. Thus, common sense protests that it is at least strongly likely that Samuel Johnson, who was a good Christian and wrote good verse, wrote some good Christian verse. And in fact his elegy ‘On the death of Mr Robert Levet’ (which is included neither in Davie’s anthology nor in Cecil’s) seems to me a very good Christian poem, not ...”

“... is, had only the ‘Brutus legend’ to guide him to his own history; four centuries later, Dr Johnson was little better informed. Some antiquarians may have noted that the names of the days of the week bore witness to a pagan history (though an Anglo-Saxon, not a Scandinavian one). But neither Vikings nor sagas existed in learned or popular ...”

“... may be an exaggeration. He did nothing to hide his distaste for the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, and – more in keeping with his earlier sentiments – lent his name to public statements protesting against the Vietnam War, and organised a group of historians who prepared a report for the House impeachment committee on abuses of ...”

“... children, both legitimate and illegitimate’, may have been the father of a second ‘“Benjamin Johnson fil. Ben”, baptised at St Martin-in-the-Fields’ in 1610. And on the matter of what might have constituted traumatic experience for Jonson: he had at this point lost his own father before he was born, fought and ...”