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“... about Carlyle with both authority and imagination is a daunting enterprise. For one thing, Dr Johnson apart, no English man of letters has ever held a higher opinion of the dignity of biography as a literary form, or inferentially expected more from its practitioners. Carlyle’s most famous dictum, ‘History is the essence of innumerable ...”

“... Carney doesn’t meet. The club’s de facto leader, a dictatorial financier called Wilfred Duke, explains that the club was named for the author of The Count of Monte Cristo, ‘a man who got things done’. (Dumas was not, as Duke insists, the son of a French general and a Haitian slave, but their grandson, making ...”

“... forced the early historians of English literature such as Thomas Warton, Thomas Percy and Samuel Johnson to review the grounds of their judgments. He is at the same time the lonely outsider commemorated by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and (more cannily) Wordsworth. David Fairer maintains that their Wertherisation of Chatterton’s alleged suicide concentrated ...”

“... guru-ship, what the Falls Road is for Belfast Catholics. At first sight this is surprising. As the Duke of Wellington said, because you are born in a stable you are not necessarily a horse, and because you are a writer and publish something and happen to live in a certain area of Paris, which is in any case large and densely populated, you are not necessarily ...”

“... about black radio commentators who talked of ‘Queen Elizabeth Eleven’ and her husband, the ‘Duke of Ellington’. The people who told you the stories were always white and they had never heard the commentator themselves; either ‘a friend’ had, or they’d ‘heard’ that it had happened, thus confirming that one, and possibly two, comfortable old ...”

“... Aristophanes’ – in both cases rather flatteringly – Foote included among his fans Dr Johnson (‘For a broad laugh I must confess the scoundrel has no fellow’) and Edward Gibbon, who told his sister in a letter: ‘When I am tired of the Roman Empire I can laugh away an evening at Foote’s theatre.’ Yet he died, said Garrick, excusing ...”

“... scholarship boys. He was the real thing, a King’s Scholar (three years ahead of Boris Johnson); in my case, when my parents demonstrated financial need, the school eventually helped out with a bursary. I was lucky – my religious parents would have insisted on ‘blessed’ – and savoured that luck, grateful to be at such a school, though often ...”

“... his pupils, pretending not to be there when they knocked. Those had been the days when the later Duke of Windsor had been an undergraduate, as also Prince Chichibu, the son of the Japanese Emperor. On his first day in the college Chichibu, following custom, had called on President Warren – well-known as an incorrigible lover of blue blood. What, asked ...”

“... spirit. There is the rumour that he listens to Coltrane on his iPod, the offhand allusions to Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. There is his involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle, his empathy for ‘the millions left behind in Jakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank’. There is his wistful recollection of ...”

“... is now best-remembered for one photograph and for one action. The photograph shows him next to the Duke of Grafton while assuming his stall at Windsor as a Knight of the Garter, and the action was the compiling (would that be the word?) of a resignation honours list that rewarded those who – oh, dash it, I don’t know – shall we say made money rather than ...”

“... After all, the PM is apparently also related to Moses, Catherine the Great, William IV and Boris Johnson, and in 2013 was outed as the first cousin six times removed of a West Indian slave-owner. But one of Low’s other descendants – and another of Cameron’s relatives – was ready to respond. Ferdinand Mount is the great-great-grandchild of John Low ...”

“... to be made anew in each generation. Maybe Chancery just for once got it nearly right. Certainly Dr Johnson thought so. Shortly after he had been involved by Boswell in a long correspondence on the subject of entails, on which Boswell was quarrelling with his father, Johnson told Mrs Thrale that an entail did not indicate ...”

“... In March 1776, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather ...”

“... Goldsmith as ‘an awkward, improvident and slightly ridiculous Irishman … whose genius [Johnson] nevertheless acknowledged and championed’ – though in fact almost every reference to Goldsmith in the Life of Samuel Johnson itself belittles him. Boswell was not alone. After Goldsmith’s death in 1774 stories of ...”

“... explain himself as little as if he spoke only German. He might have remained in obscurity, if the Duke of Newcastle’s necessity of employing men of talents inferior even to his own, and his alacrity in discovering persons so qualified, had not dragged poor Sir Thomas into light and ridicule.’ Walpole may shape events too readily in terms of antithesis (as ...”