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“... Writers do not always know what their best writings are. Daniel Defoe believed his magnum opus to be his huge, passionately political, intermittently philosophical poem in heroic couplets, Jure Divino (1706). Begun while he was imprisoned in Newgate, its 12 books assailed the doctrine of the divine right of monarchs from every angle he could imagine ...”

“... reproachful, very English in its good-humoured and long-suffering manner, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe is in more ways than one a caution. The cautionary tale it tells concerns the unplanned growth of the canon of Defoe’s works, which has sprawled from a hundred items to something like six times that figure ...”

“... before he died in a Soho rooming-house, Hazlitt published a lengthy essay on a new biography of Daniel Defoe in the Edinburgh Review, where he remarked that in Robinson Crusoe Defoe abandoned the political and religious subjects he addressed in his pamphlets, and confined himself to ‘unsophisticated views of nature ...”

“... In many ways, Paula Backscheider has written a highly appropriate life of Defoe. Fat, fact-filled and repetitious, her book offers a meandering narrative of merchant adventures and spying, opportunism and piety, taking us from fire and plague to bankruptcy via the battlefield of Sedgemoor, Newgate prison and the pillory ...”

“... is ‘how to judge when to venture and when not to venture’. This, according to Sill, was also Defoe’s recipe for Britain’s political welfare, and before emerging as a novelist, he had been advocating it by fictional methods in various pseudo-biographical works: thus Robinson Crusoe was not altogether a new start. The scheme of Robinson Crusoe and of ...”

“... the door, the Memorial argued, to Puritan fanaticism and the levelling politics that came with it. Daniel Defoe, an able provocateur in his own right, thought the Memorial ‘Mutinous Bluster’, ‘a Malicious Seditious Book’, an ‘Invidious Trumpet of Rebellion’. Writing from the battlefields of Belgium during the War of the Spanish Succession, the ...”

“... Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates detailed scrutiny. It may be worth asking how Lever (born 1806) contrived to predate Jane ...”

“... This new issue of Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain is very pretty. It is a glossy book, lavishly illustrated with 18th-century maps, portraits, landscapes, prospects of towns and representations of buildings, markets, ships. This is obviously meant to function as a coffee-table book, or as a book to put in the back of a car (along with the National Trust’s guides ...”

“... and 43.5 cm wide. Jokes about the ever burgeoning pocket seem to have begun quite early: in 1724, Daniel Defoe reported in his Tour of Great Britain that ‘at Stourbridge Fair’ he saw something entirely new, ‘a Pocket of Wool. This seems to be first call’d so in Mockery, this Pocket being so big, that it loads a whole Waggon … and these ...”

“... of the kings of Europe had re-created their ancestors to suit their own purposes: when in 1726 Daniel Defoe visited the portrait gallery of the kings of Scotland at Holyroodhouse, he had no doubt that they were ‘all guesswork’. But pictorial displays always had a propaganda purpose, often celebrating past victories in battle, as with the Armada ...”

“... fully mechanised factory in the world. In his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Daniel Defoe called it a ‘curiosity of a very extraordinary nature … the engine contains 26,586 wheels and 97,746 movements, which work 73,726 yards of silk-thread every time the water-wheel goes round, which is three times in one minute, and 318,504,960 ...”

“... Daniel O’Keefe’s massive survey of magic not only tells us ‘how to do it’ but gives us some policy recommendations too. His book reads like the transcript of a Royal Commission report on the occult. It is not easy reading, but the effort is worthwhile. His advice extends to such fields as politics, economics and war: this scope gives some clue both to the structure and to the theme of Stolen Lightning ...”

“... the sun’ can be traced back without difficulty from today’s favourite holiday destinations to Daniel Defoe and, before him, to the real-life adventure of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk’s cave on the beach of Robinson Crusoe island in the Juan Fernandez group is still shown to visitors; the island is rich in vegetation but its ...”

“... should call; though the Parliament should call, or though the whole Nation should call. When Daniel Defoe, the world’s first great financial journalist, wrote these words in 1706, only a decade had passed since the establishment of modern credit-based capitalism, with the foundation of the Bank of England and the creation of the National Debt. He ...”

“... exposed its victims to whatever filth the crowd might want to hurl at them, was used to punish Daniel Defoe in 1703 for his provocative pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (‘a Seditious, pernicious and Diabolical Libel’); it haunted Dryden during the Exclusion Crisis (1679-82), when the temporary lapse of the Licensing Act made ‘every ...”