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“... Is​ there an 18th-century writer to rival Oliver Goldsmith? Who else achieved lasting popular and critical success in all three major genres? The Vicar of Wakefield has never been out of print; The Deserted Village was a schoolroom favourite well into the 20th century; and She Stoops to Conquer is still performed ...”

“... but it is an introverted and academic humour, not calculated to appeal to a wider audience. ‘Goldsmith is writing a Natural History,’ Samuel Johnson said to Boswell, ‘and you can be sure that he will make it as entertaining as a Persian Tale.’ So he did, turning naturally to Buffon for his material and method. Like the Histoire naturelle, ...”

“... puzzle explored by John Eglin in The Imaginary Autocrat. It is a task that was first attempted by Oliver Goldsmith in a ‘quickie’ life put together immediately after Nash’s death. What was a beau? He was no more than a dandy much occupied with fashion and deportment; if he had a soul, it was that of a dancing-master. He knew, as Eglin ...”

“... as an English gentleman. It’s a transformation with a venerable Irish history, all the way from Oliver Goldsmith to Oscar Wilde. Unlike Goldsmith and Wilde, however, Heathcliff doesn’t make too impressive a job of impersonating the English upper class. You can take Heathcliff out of the Heights, but you can’t ...”

“... his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman were already members and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be admitted a few years later. The Club wasn’t just full of luvvies; it began with quite serious purposes and ambitions. With his rancorous first biographer, John ...”

“... rural descriptions, praises Bacon and Locke, refers to the poetry of Thomas Gray, Allen Ramsay and Oliver Goldsmith, casually mentions that he does not need to read David Hume on miracles, and obliquely compares his own work with that of Milton? There is a paradox here: the more Bewick strove to establish his credentials as an artist, the more apparent it ...”

“... verbal dexterity to hawk. As such, he joined an honourable lineage of Irish licensed jesters from Oliver Goldsmith to Brendan Behan (Terry Wogan and Graham Norton are minor offshoots), men who punctured English pomposity and found moral earnestness irresistibly comic, yet whose capacity to amuse rendered them more or less acceptable. It was a perilous ...”

“... but would secretly like to be, and as such they evoke a mixture of derision and admiration. From Oliver Goldsmith and Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw, Brendan Behan and Graham Norton, John Bull’s other island has furnished the British with a series of talented court jesters, praised and patronised in equal measure. Ireland was burdened with the ...”

“... rambling around Bristol in search of Chatterton’s ghost (‘I paced about, in the footsteps of Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell and many others . . .’), for all the world like a print version of Simon Schama. One can almost see the make-up and microphone. It is a smart rather than deep study, with more wit than soul. Groom’s rather ...”

“... some semblance of pre-modern Gemeinschaft might still just about be salvaged. Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Francis Hutcheson and Edmund Burke all made vital Irish contributions to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James ...”

“... bus stops, and the shops grow shabbier. Here on the corner of Peckham Road and Southampton Way is Oliver Goldsmith School, which Damilola Taylor attended. Another group of policemen stands outside it. Behind the railings which line one side of the building are laid out the inevitable floral tributes to the boy – a line of cellophane bouquets stretching ...”

“... imagine, as you pass through the London of 1740-70, that this was also a place where Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke and Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Malone, William Pitt and David Garrick could meet in the upstairs room of a pub to exchange genial perceptions on the course of the moral universe. I am pleased for Boswell, and grateful, too, that ...”

“... anyone who could pay. Describing a tour of the abbey in his 1762 satire The Citizen of the World, Oliver Goldsmith wrote:The gentleman that lies here is remarkable, very remarkable – for a tomb in Westminster-abbey … the gentleman was rich, and his friends, as is usual in such a case, told him he was great. He readily believed them; the guardians of ...”

“... best. Johnson was soon the star attraction of a circle that included Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney and Joshua Reynolds, whose portraits of the group adorned the walls of the library in Streatham. Hester presided with remarkable wit, vivacity and in Burney’s neologism, ‘agreeability’; in both contemporary and modern ...”

“... sitting down occasionally by the wayside to dip into it.’ My great-grandfather soon discovered Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas De Quincey. ‘The beauty of the prose poems and neatness of the humour was such as I had never before met with.’ The practical mysteries of propagation and grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge ...”