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“... 1900-1939 and Lord Randolph Churchill, here present in a chatty round-up that is mere fluff; Paul Addison, who once worked with Randolph S. on editing the C papers, here useful on C and social reform; the navalist Richard Ollard, who has written on the Churchill-impacted Admirals Fisher and Cunningham (and the Navy), John Grigg (and Lloyd ...”

“... and his mates would be at Will’s; and in the 1710s you could join in polite conversation with Addison and Steele at Button’s. If you wanted to gamble, the Young Man’s was a good bet; if experimental natural philosophy was your thing, Royal Society virtuosi frequently repaired to Garraway’s after their official meetings; if you wanted medical ...”

“... that ‘some method should be thought on for ascertaining and fixing our Language for ever.’ Addison toyed with the idea of writing a dictionary, as Johnson notes in his Life. Meanwhile, through the 16th and 17th centuries, the English dictionary was slowly developing. Previous English dictionaries had developed from Old English glosses to Latin ...”

“... society in the 18th century interest in weight became a measure of male hypochondria. Joseph Addison imagined a weight-obsessed man who spent all day checking his weight by sitting on a pair of scales: ‘I do not dine and sup by the Clock, but by my Chair; for when that informs me my Pound of Food is exhausted I conclude my self to be hungry, and lay in ...”

“... is subjected to genius-forming song recitals:             What are the Lays of artful Addison, Coldly correct, to Shakespear’s Warblings wild? Whom on the winding Avon’s willow’d Banks Fair Fancy found, and bore the smiling Babe To a close Cavern: (still the Shepherds shew The sacred Place, whence with religious Awe They hear, returning from ...”

“... known use of the word in English was in 1230, when an Oxford street was named Gropecunt Lane. Paul Dacre, that nice man who edits the Daily Mail, has become famous in recent times for ‘double-cunting’: a colleague, usually male, will be ticked off via a thunderous, compound deployment of the Old Frisian. ‘You call that a good cunting headline, you ...”

“... it had every reason to fear’. The prose of Milton was replaced overnight by the prose of Addison, which in all essentials is ‘still our cultivated norm’. The full-stretch, vehemently unAddisonian muscularity of Hughes’s prose is a protest against civility that announces its pedigree – Bunyan, Milton, Lawrence – in an impulsive ...”

“... of 18th-century Masonry, but their tentative conclusions are at odds with Piatigorsky’s thesis. Paul Monod thinks that the message of restoration underpinning Masonic ritual – the rebirth in every Master Mason of King Solomon’s murdered builder Hiram Abiff – proved congenial to English Jacobites, while Philip Jenkins detects a distinctive Jacobite and ...”

“... of print on metropolitan and even provincial streets, and at the coffee houses and tea tables that Addison celebrated in his Spectator papers of 1711-12. Mounds of paper clog the streets in one of the first and funniest satires on excessive print, Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1676); then come the proliferating ‘Journals, Merc’ries, Medleys, Magazines’ of ...”

“... most extended and schematic exorcism of history and mythology. The poem is – to borrow Paul Zweig’s phrase for ‘Song of Myself’ – a ‘therapeutic epic’. Each of its main characters represents an unfortunate aspect of the West Indian inheritance which, as the poem progresses, is either cured or comfortably accommodated. Philoctete, for ...”

“... parody of Pamela’s writing-to-the-moment technique as the pen drops in homage to the penis. Paul-Gabriel Boucé’s essay on ‘Chthonic and Pelagic Metaphorisation in Eighteenth-Century English Erotica’ is a virtuoso display of linguistic excarnation, turning the flesh into the word. For Boucé sex is lexis; a vagina is never merely a vagina, but a ...”

“... anxiety and grief which readers conveyed to Richardson or to Dickens over the fate of Clarissa or Paul Dombey (whose death ‘threw a whole nation into mourning’) is disconcertingly replicated in popular responses to radio and TV soap-operas. What Flaubert was to extol as novelistic ‘illusion’ has obvious affinities with the hoax and other forms of ...”