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“... This Johnson is an energetic essayist. His energy is not simply physical, though he has plenty of that: it is mental too. He seems to write quickly – how else the productivity? – but he writes also with a kind of cerebral force, apparent in all these essays, which are themselves the tip of an intellectual iceberg: he has also written standard books on both South Africa and the French Left which combine contemporary political description with historical analysis in an admirable and often memorable way ...”

“... the Transvaal, including van Onselen’s The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine (reviewed by R.W. Johnson in the LRB of 12 December 1996). In a caption for a shot of Maine and his wife sitting outside their shack, Goldblatt writes: ‘She complained that he would not build her a house although he could afford to do so.’ Maine was a patriarch, presiding over ...”

“... finds her measuring ‘my performance against that of other countries in the real world’.R.W. Johnson, 20 April 1989If​ you want to see the cutting edge of Thatcherism, go to Basingstoke. There, as we learn in Paul Hirst’s After Thatcher, the local council (careful, no doubt, with its ratepayers’ money) has allowed an insurance company to take over ...”

“... If the comparisons are to be made at all, they must be made with tact, as they were by R.W. Johnson in this paper some months ago. Comfort has succeeded in writing a 175-page novel without using a single semi-colon; the absence of this most measured form of punctuation is symptomatic. Comfort’s anti-Thatcherite philosophers don’t seem to want to do ...”

“... lit; the Metro is thought not to be safe, taxis even less so. A few days ago our contributor, R.W. Johnson, a big man but in Moscow an obvious foreigner, was set upon by a gang of ten-year-olds on Gorky Street at midday. His clothes were ripped; he was lucky, he said, to have escaped with his life. In the block of flats where I was staying there were two ...”

“... and an intense frustration with the stale taboos of a superannuated revolutionary culture. A raw and rattled US has responded with warmth. Iran, the first country into Islamic millenarian government in modern times, looks set to be the first out. James Buchan Norfolk Last Tuesday morning, 11 September, I was planning on finishing up an LRB review I was ...”

“... piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ – has anyone else between Powell in 1968 and Boris Johnson in 2002 used the word ‘piccaninnies’? And what was it Johnson said about women in burkas? ‘It is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letterboxes.’ Coincidental no doubt ...”

“... emphasis.Karl’s verbal snapshots, I soon and lastingly learned, were a wonder of the world. R.W. Johnson was in those days writing a series of super-forthright, abrasive pieces that often featured glancing dismissals of all sorts of senior Labour Party figures. One of these pieces had come in and been edited by Mary-Kay, and Karl was reading it in ...”

“... of his significance. A notable example appeared in this paper (8 February 1990), when R.W. Johnson sharply criticised Williams’s political judgment and wrote in disparaging terms about the combination of uplift and unrealism allegedly characteristic of the Welsh labour movement from which he was assumed to have emerged. This contested ...”

“... in African politics at Oxford, explains: ‘Off went the poorly cut uniform and in came Savile Row suits.’ But party and state have remained inextricably bound together; and both perform the will of the president, José Eduardo dos Santos, who assumed office in an age of strongmen, between Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 and Robert ...”

“... Claudia Johnson begins with a ghost story. One summer morning, as she sat by the leaded gothic windows of her Princeton study editing the Norton Critical Edition of Mansfield Park, she was stumped about where a comma ought to go. In the second sentence of the eighth chapter there is a discrepancy between the first and second edition of the novel: did Mr Rushworth’s mother come ‘to be civil, and to shew her civility, especially in urging the execution of the plan to visit Sotherton’ or, as the later version has it, to ‘shew her civility especially, in urging the execution of the plan’? Both editions were published in Austen’s lifetime, and she was involved with the re-editing of the second ...”

“... replicate her self-image, like a virus taking over the natural function of a cell. When Thomas Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955, it was thought that her texts had finally been restored to the state in which, had she agreed to be published at all, she would have wanted them to be read. Not a bit of it. Argument has continued over ...”

“... according to Arnett), and finally in the Persian Gulf. During the Vietnam War, a member of Johnson’s White House staff, Jack Valenti, suggested that the Administration should publicise the charge that the New Zealander, Arnett, and the Canadian, Morley Safer, were undermining the war effort because ‘they are not Americans and do not have the basic ...”

“... good look round this place and come to the conclusion that it’s pretty inefficient.’ Plainly, rows lay ahead, and Monty – as one candid friend was to put it years later – ‘would do anything to avoid a row or a crusade or anything which raises the mental or moral temperature’. Then the First World War ...”

“... and issued in forms determined by the publishing, cultural and academic orthodoxies of the day. Johnson’s 1955 edition is now routinely taken to embody the ideals and blindnesses of the New Criticism, while an editorial commitment to the variant-strewn manuscripts – a kind of ‘choosing not choosing’ (to borrow the title of an influential book on ...”