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“... On​ 14 April 1988, right at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, a US navy frigate, Samuel B. Roberts, hit a mine and was badly damaged. Ten of the crew were injured. The US blamed Iran – even though Iraq had been just as active in laying mines – and attacked the Iranian navy, sinking the frigate Sahand and the fast attack craft Joshan ...”

“... Johnson’s Imlac, urging that the poet neglect the ‘minuter discriminations’ of the tulip leaf in favour of ‘general properties’, has been unpopular for two hundred years, never more so than now, when it is believed that accumulated tiny detail – thinginess – vouches for a poem’ s authenticity. But Imlac also argues, apparently contradicting himself, that ‘to a poet nothing can be useless,’ that he ‘must know many languages and many sciences’ and through his command of botany, zoology, astronomy, politics, ethics and so on become a ‘legislator of mankind ...”

“... According to Boswell, Johnson was so hostile to gesticulation that ‘when another gentleman thought he was giving additional force to what he uttered, by expressive movements of his hands, Johnson fairly seized them and held them down.’ But in restraining someone else’s gestures, he himself gestured; he gave additional force to his opinion by expressive movements of his hands ...”

“... here delicately analysed, but also Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, Frances Burney and others. Dr Johnson remarked that the ‘call for books’ had greatly increased since Milton’s time. ‘To read was not then a general amusement; neither traders, nor often gentlemen thought themselves disgraced by ignorance. The women had not then aspired to ...”

“... the odd glimpse of this old fiscal reactionary, and of some other Thirties dinosaurs like Sir Samuel Hoare. Of the latter Worsthorne reports ‘the personal antipathy everybody felt, including his wife, Lady Maude, to this cold and unattractive statesman’, but adds that at the age of five he himself could see the good-egg side of the man. He misses the ...”

“... Wilkes and James Boswell, but also by landowners, clerics and society hostesses – Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s confidante, owned several jestbooks and comic miscellanies. In this context it becomes easier – though still not entirely easy – to understand the characteristic stance of the jestbooks towards class and gender. Some anecdotes – not ...”

“... am then never less alone than when alone.’ Or it might have been Byron, or Byron’s favourite, Samuel Rogers, both of whom put the solitude paradox into verse. It might even have been Cicero, quoting Scipio Africanus: nec minus solus quam cum solus esset. Hazlitt and Whitman did not much care who the ‘old fellow’ was who first coined the phrase: he had ...”

“... Jones, who had been hanged for witchcraft on Boston Common in June 1648, or the servant Mary Johnson, pregnant with an illegitimate child, who was condemned six months later, having confessed to ‘familiarity with the devil’. In the years following there was a flood of accusations. When in May 1649 Sarah Edwards’s cow produced multicoloured ...”

“... upward blip in 1987 or 1988 – the curve of Labour support has gone downwards ever since. R.W. Johnson’s often perverse, sometimes brilliant and always provocative volume of essays provides a splendid point of departure for exploring the connections between these two themes. The best one is a discursive enquiry into the cultural roots of British ...”

“... Colepeper, we can be fairly confident that Behn was the daughter of a Canterbury barber called Johnson, born on 14 December 1640 and christened Eaffrey. From here onwards, though, things get difficult. When we next hear of her, Eaffrey/Aphra is in her mid-twenties and calling herself Mrs Behn, though of Mr Behn we have only a report in the posthumous and ...”

“... of the age and state of reason. Foucault’s account of the Retreat (drawn entirely from Samuel Tuke’s Description of the Retreat of 1813) forms part of a larger canvas depicting the transition from an age where madness and reason used the honest weapons of coercion in their manichaean struggle (with each paying the other its due as a worthy ...”

“... of Gerzina’s book). Neither writer refers to Gory, the black manservant of Lord Monboddo, whom Johnson and Boswell encountered on their 1773 tour of the Hebrides, or Pablo Fanque (a.k.a. William Darby), the acrobat and North of England circus proprietor. We still don’t know how successfully black people integrated with their local communities in towns ...”

“... Johnson wrote The Lives of the Poets,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning grumbled, ‘and left out the poets.’ She exaggerated, of course, but a book of that title which omitted Chaucer and Shakespeare, Spenser and all the Elizabethans, Donne and nearly all the Jacobeans, while including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith, Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading ...”

“... her crossed arms; but so, as not more than one side of it to be hid. Carol Houlihan Flynn’s Samuel Richardson is alert and sensible, and diligent in its rounding-up of backgrounds – rape cases, sentimental fiction, rake-literature – but is fairly predictable in its judgments. Pamela is awkward but interesting, Clarissa a brooding masterpiece and Sir ...”