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“... a real language, Hebrew, helped to write a history of printing, and became a respected friend of Samuel Johnson. A serious call … God might speak through him, Ernest surmises, if it weren’t for his own personal belly-god, that shabby demon, pumping out ‘so much rammel and trash’. As it is, God lurks around, even if manifesting Himself chiefly ...”

“... something we can see but not experience: living is necessarily independent of it. In his study of Samuel Beckett, Christopher Ricks says that we desire both oblivion and eternity; but except in the insidiously artificial world of writers like Beckett, who make death a cliché within the life of language, neither of these wishes makes much sense. Dr ...”

“... about poor James Boswell, another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: ‘Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!’) All the same, despite Svevo’s rule, there have been a few people – Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence come to mind – who not only went on expecting to be transformed, but managed to be so – and this ...”

“... wrong house. At No. 9, a more accurately sited plaque marks where, in 1764, Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson founded the Literary Club, or simply the Club, which met weekly to dine in an upstairs room at the Turk’s Head until the landlord died and the dinners moved elsewhere. The building now houses New Loon Moon, one of London’s best-known ...”

“... and that the inclusion of a word in a dictionary is in no way an attempt to change its status. (Samuel Johnson would have had a word for this dereliction of the lexicographer’s duty: the word is ‘pusillanimous’.) So there are Biro and Landrover and Hoover and Perspex and even Realtor. But if, pausing for refreshment, you should look for what ...”

“... was his notorious response to hearing Shakespeare praised for never having blotted a line). Samuel Johnson catches Shakespeare ‘entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it for a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be ...”

“... the light. In 1832, Carlyle reviewed John Wilson Croker’s new edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and emphasised, as Hermione Lee has noted, how biography, by recording ‘many a little Reality’, can make the reader see the world as it existed around the central figure, its depths and contours suggested by his or her ramifying contacts ...”

“... others, forced the early historians of English literature such as Thomas Warton, Thomas Percy and Samuel Johnson to review the grounds of their judgments. He is at the same time the lonely outsider commemorated by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and (more cannily) Wordsworth. David Fairer maintains that their Wertherisation of Chatterton’s alleged suicide ...”

“... figure as the opposite of rational discourse, a move which would have come as a mighty surprise to Samuel Johnson, while the boldest scientific ventures were being jealously denied the epithet ‘creative’. Post-Modernism has begun to undo this dichotomy, aware that critical language is itself a form of rhetoric and that the Modernist or Post-Modernist ...”

“... Recording the moment Samuel Johnson startled his friends in 1775 by declaring patriotism to be the ‘last refuge of a scoundrel’, Boswell felt that the definition needed to be glossed. Johnson ‘did not mean’, he assured readers, ‘a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest ...”

“... nationality has never been in doubt, though this is scarcely true of his friend and compatriot Samuel Beckett. It would be interesting to know how many British university libraries shelve Beckett’s books under French, not Irish, literature. Traitors sell their nationality, whereas writers, if they are well-known, find themselves trading on their ...”

“... and there is hard evidence that both here and in her attitude to religion much in the writings of Samuel Butler came to her with the force of self-revelation. But on the subject of her family and what it may have given the novels Mrs Spurling, when writing her first volume, had largely to depend on conversations with Ivy’s two surviving sisters, old ladies ...”

“... has claimed her for posterity. When a memorial to her was finally put up in 1909, it was to ‘Dr Johnson’s Mrs Thrale’. In one of his last missives to his ‘dear mistress’, shortly before her marriage to Piozzi caused him to burn all her letters, Johnson credited Hester with soothing ‘twenty years of a life ...”

“... best was dead. The greatest writing was like some monument, untouchable and serene. One thinks of Samuel Johnson on Skye telling Boswell that an eloquent inscription commemorating a local worthy in a parish church ‘should have been in Latin, as every thing intended to be universal and permanent, should be’. The deathless, lifeless qualities of poetry ...”

“... other proprieties, adored the demotic; he relishes the taste of ‘uppish’ on the tongue. When Samuel Johnson, on the other hand, defines ‘uppish’ as ‘proud; arrogant’ and ‘a low word’, so low as to deserve no illustration in the Dictionary, he conceals no secret yearning – and also delimits the range of a characterisation both supple ...”