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“... a moment. The Lyttelton-Hart-Davis Letters had their origins towards the close of a dinner at the Johnson Club, attended as Hart-Davis’s guest by George Lyttelton (1883-1962), a retired Eton housemaster. Lyttelton, by then 72 and living in Suffolk, complained that no one wrote discursive letters any longer: an obsolete expression of friendship which must ...”

“... cannot say much in favour of it either. He calls it ‘this heavy hectoring poem’ and quotes Samuel Johnson, who said that Liberty’s ‘praises were condemned to harbour spiders’. Johnson, of course, held a political view very different from that of Thomson, but even ardent Whigs seem to have felt fatigued by ...”

“... figures 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 ...”

“... another mode, there was the comic paranoia of ‘A Dream of Judgment’ (‘Posterity, thy name is Samuel Johnson’), where the Doctor delivers infallible negatives on the poet’s work – what else should a Scot expect? – and the fine satire ‘A Poem in Praise of the British’, where the tatters of Empire drift through the dreams of ‘old ...”

“... the spelling. In the middle of the 18th century, however, lexicographers became more ambitious. Samuel Johnson, uneasily aware that ‘sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints,’ limited himself in his great dictionary to indicating stress ‘by printing an accent upon the acute or elevated syllable’. Subsequent dictionary-makers ...”

“... class and gender. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel opens with a brilliant consideration of Samuel Richardson’s career. In addition to writing three important and influential novels – which take the form of letters compiled, edited, arranged, prefaced, annotated or excerpted by an inscribed editor, and in which the appropriation and quotation of ...”

“... Invoke the authority of a central critical tradition, he was adept at echoing Arnold. Coleridge or Samuel Johnson, as he did in his assault on C.P. Snow: ‘The peculiar quality of Snow’s assurance expresses itself in a pervasive tone; a tone of which one can say that, while only genius could justify it, one cannot readily think of genius adopting ...”

“... is stuff that gets the pulse racing. The words flow. Apt phrases from T.S. Eliot; some Bob Dylan; Samuel Johnson; much dazzle and many jokes; Keats-Byron-Tennyson-Dryden-Shakespeare-Beckett-Hill running giddily into each other; but each writer and observation given its space to illuminate and be illuminated into a radiant energy, which conveys, above ...”

“... smugly (or unhappily) celibate. As a result, many of the most vigorous and creative intellects – Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon and Newton himself after the Principia was published – left the universities for London in search of patronage, inspiration, new contacts and the throb of life. It was London indisputably, the centre of ...”

“... creation through multiplying the dazzling heterogeneity of types. Almost anticipating Leriche, Samuel Johnson gave Jenyns’s special pleading for pain the drubbing it deserved – such apologiae were tantamount to suggesting that the Almighty took sadistic ‘delight in the operations of an asthma, as a human philosopher in the effects of the air ...”

“... by J.C. Bach. Frugal in his own habits, he was generous to others. He bestowed pensions on Samuel Johnson, Hume and Rousseau (he eventually gave one to Rousseau’s widow, the much despised Thérèse Levasseur). He built up an unparalleled collection of scientific instruments, now in the Science Museum. He founded the Royal Academy and supported ...”

“... as naked and barren as any we had seen’ where ‘nothing but sterility was to be seen.’ Like Samuel Johnson in the Highlands, he was disturbed by the lack of trees: ‘Not a single tree or shrub, nor the least sign of any, was to be discovered.’ Even driftwood was missing: ‘throughout the whole extent of the harbour, I found not a single ...”

“... forthright statement or explanation of the rationale of its critical method.’ I stand with Samuel Johnson in rejecting ‘the cant of those who judge by principles rather than perception’.The publisher backed down, and Watt’s very good book went out into the world with its admirably modest two-page preface. Clearly, Watt was far from being a ...”

“... and constructions of the biographer of a friend. The first is the more than a million words of Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa, whose first edition has been issued by Penguin in the guise of a slab of gold bullion. The second is by an admirer of Richardson’s novels, two generations later – Lady Louisa Stuart, whose Memoire of Frances Scott, Lady ...”

“... fill the ear with some splendid novelty than awaken those ideas that slumber in the heart’ – Samuel Johnson, who in a page or two of unanswerable analysis clarifies the reasons why a poet whom he both loved and respected could not conceal ‘the difficulty which he found in exhibiting the genuine operations of the heart’. The key word is ...”