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“... I doubt Ricks’s general notion here and wonder how it survived his transcription of Samuel Johnson’s reply to Miss Seward: ‘The lady confounds annihilation, which is nothing, with the apprehension of it, which is dreadful. It is in the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists.’ Or Swift’s ‘Thoughts on Various ...”

“... John Weightman, reviewing Jean-Denis Bredin’s monumental work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century ...”

“... With the catcalls from the terraces grown so strident, how much longer can Chairman Tom cling on? Denis Donoghue was an admirer of Eliot’s before Paulin was born, and brings the fruit of many decades’ reading and rumination to Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot. Donoghue begins by invoking his own 1990 memoir, Warrenpoint, which he had hoped to ...”

“... rival factions in the intelligence community: the ‘tree of smoke’ that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. I inhaled that smoke myself in 1969-70, when I was a cryptographer with a Top Secret clearance on a US navy ship that carried missiles armed with nuclear warheads – the existence of which the navy ...”

“... the Thatcher years than one might have hoped. Shrewdly, he believes the letters were a boon to Denis Thatcher because they portrayed him as a pantomime buffoon, making it all but impossible for the press to see him as the steady and powerfully right-wing influence on his wife that he was. At 92 Deedes has become an almost iconic figure. His modesty, good ...”

“... and dull in the experimental novel Coe turns into entertainment. He is writing a biography of B.S. Johnson – whom he admires – but he writes more like Pamela Hansford Johnson. He has established for himself a set of stylistic conventions – conversational smooth prose, non-sequential narrative, the use of interpolated ...”

“... is much the more difficult to imagine as a child. Nobody, surely, can have that problem with Boris Johnson. The mind’s eye sees Boris as one of Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, a bouncy fellow demanding his tea and laying plans ‘to be/the next Prime Minister but three’. But the mind’s eye can be wrong – Johnson’s ...”

“... like Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner, or Francophiles like Stephen Heath and Stephen Bann. Samuel Johnson had moral principles, but nothing like a theory of literature: he didn’t need one. The force of English common sense is that it leaves you free to deal with the things that matter. Till recently, Johnsonian sentiments have prevailed: supported, if ...”

“... of a passing ice-cream van playing the opening bars of the ‘Blue Danube’. ‘He is dying, Denis. Will you exist now? Will that satisfy you?’ She was crying. ‘I’ll make it right, Joyce,’ said Midgley. ‘I’ll be there when he goes. I’ll hold his hand.’ He held hers, still in its orange gauntlet. ‘If I let him down now he’d stay with ...”

“... into official statistics about immigration. Undoubtedly, though, for the man on the metro to Saint-Denis who finds (as one easily can) that his is the only white face left in his coach by the time the train gets to the terminus, the crucial fact is skin colour, not whether his fellow passengers are Harkis, Antillais or even tourists. (Out in Saint-...”

“... from the sale of the old BNOC. Her back-handed account is all the more remarkable in view of Denis Healey’s observations on the depths of the first Thatcher recession of 1980-81: ‘It would have been impossible for Britain to have survived these disasters without North Sea oil ... During Mrs Thatcher’s first nine years it brought the Treasury £62 ...”

“... writers casting about for inspiration in the 1990s, two books showed the way. The first was Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son (1992), a collection of autobiographical stories revolving around the misadventures of a character known mostly as Fuckhead. It mined Johnson’s life during his years as a drug addict in ...”

“... it. The real question about Foot’s leadership is whether he shouldn’t have ceded place to Denis Healey a few months before the 1983 election. The polls suggest this would have produced a dead heat with the Tories as Alliance voters defected back to Labour en masse. Here Jones is far too kind and tries to throw the blame on the Shadow Cabinet for not ...”

“... R.W. Johnson’s article in this issue is taken from some of his blog posts during the South Africa 2010 World Cup. More of his posts, and those of some other LRB contributors, can be found at lrb.co.uk/blog/world-cup-2010/6 June. South Africa is being worked up by an endless media barrage into a state of great excitement and expectancy about the World Cup ...”

“... point to the frequency of such reversals in Swift; in his dealings with Esther Johnson and Mrs Dingley, even while ‘establishing for himself a fantasy family in which he might act father, brother, lover or husband as he chose’, Swift ‘was also reversing the old relationship which once made him dependent upon two women’. Reversing is ...”