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“... self-preoccupied. It is a fine passage, but its value is not a scarcity value in literary history: Johnson on Soame Jenyns, Arnold on the Times, Eliot on Baudelaire, Empson on Christianity – all of them, across a range of indignation, needling, defiance, impudent jokiness, and in pursuit of literary-critical considerations, question and re-draw pictures of ...”

“... she meets and describes many of the characters of the age. She is befriended by Samuel Johnson and passes the days in Mrs Thrale’s coterie at Streatham. She records the bluestocking salons of Elizabeth Montagu (material for some savage vignettes in The Witlings). Garrick frequently turns up at the Burney home in Leicester Fields to entertain them ...”

“... here, but it is for her association with Yeats that she is now remembered. A cousin of Lionel Johnson, she was married to the much older, and apparently very dull, Hope Shakespear. Yeats met Olivia at a Yellow Book dinner in 1894. He was 29, she a couple of years older. The nervous hesitations preceding their affair, which terminated the poet’s ...”

“... and she died in childbirth on board ship. This account, though it has no great manner, recalls Johnson in its fierce compression, its artful sequences and juxtapositions and ironic sharpenings; and in its powerful feeling. In addition to the 878 biographical entries on novelists, there are many publishers, illustrators, magazines and genres, and an ...”

“... that wanted the new Irish literature to be in Irish; and when one thinks of Yeats himself, and Joyce and Beckett, not to speak of Wilde and Shaw – one can only think he was right. What he wanted was an Irish cultural renaissance with English as its language. He once entertained the fine thought that a reborn Dublin could be more like 16th-century Urbino ...”

“... things that Adorno admired about Beckett’s writing was its ‘scrupulous meanness’, to borrow Joyce’s description of his own literary style in Dubliners. Beckett’s works take a few sparse elements and permutate them with Irish-scholastic ingenuity into slightly altered patterns. Complete dramas are conjured out of reshuffled arrangements of the same ...”

“... is, the world’s most sheerly entertaining tragedy, the cleverest, perhaps even the funniest. Dr Johnson meant this when he gave it ‘the praise of variety’, adding: ‘The pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth.’ Yet even Johnson had something like ‘problems’ with the play: he was too honest not to mention ...”

“... any more than we should expect Keats to represent that of the early 19th century, or James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Anthony Burgess, Martin Amis (all OED2 authors) that of today. The opposite is true: we should expect the language of these writers to stand out in a contrasting way from current usage, although this will obviously vary from ...”

“... has its roots in the New Critics’ preoccupation with the metaphysical poets, and what Samuel Johnson called their yoking together of heterogeneous ideas by violence, but it also reflects the attitudes of someone trained to believe that bread is flesh and God. Donoghue’s main claims are that metaphor ‘invokes things disgracefully far apart’ and that ...”

“... in Remnick’s book, which recalls incidents from boxing’s racist past, as when the great Jack Johnson entered the ring to chants of ‘Kill the nigger!’ Ali’s antics caused a sort of panic, disguised as abhorrence of his undignified behaviour. The conservative fight establishment still held Joe ‘He’s a credit to his race, the human race’ Louis ...”

“... The Victorian and modern ‘major authors’ were all to be found in their accustomed places – Joyce, conventionally enough, was the one addition to the strict Leavisite canon – and Eagleton’s contribution was to show them, not as great literary mentors, but as crippled and distorted ideological freaks. ‘The guarantor of a scientific criticism,’ he ...”

“... and with Malamud’s God’s Grace in the matter of cannibals. Fielding, Cleland and the Joyce of Ulysses are compared on the jargon of morality; Fielding and Ford Madox Ford on authorial intrusiveness; Fielding and Richardson on a question of moral obtuseness. Some of these are glancing blows, and are evidently not meant to be definitive. But I ...”

“... was matched by his deadpan, almost zombified prose. This ‘anti-style’ was obscured by Denys Johnson-Davies’s all too elegant 1971 translation (The Smell of It), but Creswell has restored the shock of Ibrahim’s language. He has also translated two intriguing texts that help make sense of the novel: Ibrahim’s preface to the 1986 edition and excerpts ...”

“... have formed relationships of trust with elephants in the wild (Nussbaum mentions the work of Joyce Poole), it’s not clear why we couldn’t take a mirror to the elephants where they are.Nussbaum also permits the killing of animals in ‘self-defence’, where this concept is understood quite broadly. Pests such as mice and rats may be killed ...”

“... what was real was what you could smell with your own nose and feel with your own fingers. Samuel Johnson held much the same view – and if Johnson is the kind of ‘character’ the English adore, it is not only because they take a stoutly individualist delight in the idiosyncratic, but because a ...”