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“... 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 ...”

“... Charles II to patronise the game; in 1681 he attended a game between his servants and those of the Duke of Albemarle. It was, before all others, the great game of the common people, for many centuries surviving every attempt at its repression. It was also played in many forms with many local variants. In the Derby Shrove Tuesday version the mob would follow ...”

“... she taunted her husband that their child was Boothby’s. Since Dorothy was the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, divorce was out of the question. Instead, Macmillan spent much of the 1930s having a drawn-out nervous breakdown, and became so marginal in the Tory Party that when he supported the anti-appeasement candidate against the Tory in the famous ...”

“... music was a long-cherished ambition of Giuseppi Baretti, the Italian writer and friend of Samuel Johnson, who had lived in London since 1751. After much thought, Baretti commissioned the music from François-André Danican Philidor, the French operatic composer (celebrated also for his prowess at chess). Philidor worked in Paris on what was to be his major ...”

“... bust their rivets at our follies, and I tried to imagine them confronted with the story of Bryan Johnson, a tech billionaire devoted to living for ever, who took blood from his 17-year-old son, Talmage. Some truths are better expressed in a headline, so I chose one from my new favourite online publication, the Edge: Your Longevity Magazine: ‘Billionaire ...”

“... juicy scandal, as in 1809, when it was discovered that Mary Anne Clarke, the mistress of the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the army, had been using her position to broker the sale of commissions.Historians​  of later periods will benefit from applying Knights’s big themes to subsequent stages of the corruption story. Just as empire and war ...”

“... of the joint) about halfway through it. Here is where he had chummed up with Henry Fairlie, Paul Johnson, George Gale, Kingsley Amis and many of his other life-long boon companions, whose tales of debauch and dun and infidelity are the salt of the book. He had nice manners, and a generous style which he probably didn’t think of as democratic. He was aware ...”

“... With the £500, we are on firmer ground, for it was Smith’s salary for accompanying the young Duke of Buccleuch to France in 1764, the sum that gave him the independence and leisure to write The Wealth of Nations. It is the price of a useful and virtuous existence, of influence and undying fame. John Home’s History of the Rebellion of 1745 was not ...”

“... Kathleen, a fellow rebel who defied her Catholic parents in marrying the Protestant heir to the Duke of Devonshire, in a plane crash in the Rhône Valley. A sickly, scrawny boy in a large family that worshipped physical beauty and athletic prowess, Jack Kennedy nevertheless grew up spoiled and overprivileged. Though he lived through the Great Depression, he ...”

“... him when he was made chief justice (he took the title from one of the estates of his patron, the Duke of Newcastle), he bided his time and, following the first British victories in the American war, which Mansfield supported, asked the king for an earldom. By now he was an extremely wealthy man from his practice at the bar, from the huge salary and perks of ...”

“... of the bigger bastards does not blot out the sun completely you have a sky-full that an English Duke could not buy him-self. I could shoot a record percentage up here with a crut of an English antique 12 bore shotgun let alone the Griffin and Howe Springfield I had them send me back in Key West 1931. And I would not need the telescopic sight as we all have ...”

“... of literature in our time. Its two predecessors, The Imaginary Library (1982) and Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (first published in 1987 as Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson), which were issued by a different publisher, were less sourly jokey and less apocalyptic. The first in particular ...”

“... of the new period into which Negroes appear to be emerging.’ Opportunity’s editor was Charles Johnson, a key figure in the New Negro movement, who thirty years later recalled the Harlem Renaissance as ‘that sudden and altogether phenomenal outburst of emotional expression, unmatched by any comparable period in American or Negro American history.’One ...”

“... the compulsory planting of trees was passed in 1503. The denudation continued nonetheless. Samuel Johnson lost his oak stick during his Scottish tour in 1773. Assured by Boswell that it hadn’t been stolen, he said: ‘No, no, my friend, it is not to be expected that any man in Mull, who has got it, will part with it. Consider, Sir, the value of such a piece ...”

“... rump? It must be charity. Look at the cameras. There aren’t enough of them to bring out Boris Johnson, who never failed, in all the years of his mayoralty, to insert himself on the television ‘news where you are’ for London: in hardhat, bicycle helmet, scrumcap squashed down on the finger-flicked golden mopflop of thuggish charm. A vortex of ...”