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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... impressed one of his Glasgow auditors, James Boswell, whose marvellous accumulation. The Life of Samuel Johnson, is a major peak in the Scottish eclectic tradition. In Edinburgh, formulating the canon of the new university study of English Literature, Blair tried to inscribe a marked Scottish presence. But works such as the Ossianic poems, Home’s ...”

“... the substance of the ‘lives of the poets’, a title that has little to do with Grub Street or Samuel Johnson. The favoured means of escape for Jonathan’s colleagues consists in finding an even more constricting straitjacket, a solitary cell that women cannot enter. We hear of a writer burying himself in a sub-basement padlocked from the inside, and ...”

“... abundantly said in the larger works of which it is an epigone, it at least has the advantage that Samuel Johnson commended in handbooks, of allowing you to go to the fireside and read in comfort. Given this convenience, a pursuit of etymologies is a pleasurable, skipping business, with much to reveal waywardly, not only about the quarry, the word, but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tradition in a note Edmond Malone appended to Sonnets 92 and 93 in his 1778 ‘Supplement’ to Samuel Johnson and George Steevens’s edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Malone’s footnote marks a pivotal moment in the history of Shakespeare scholarship, though in more ways than Greer allows. Malone quotes William Oldys, who thought Shakespeare was ...”

“... 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 ...”