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“... his chapter on David Ferry, he discusses ‘The Lesson’, Ferry’s touching adaptation of a poem Samuel Johnson wrote in Latin, ‘In Rivum a Mola Stoana Lichfeldiae diffluentem’. As Ricks points out, Ferry’s poem is deliberately awkward and, at least at first, anti-lyrical. Its diction is plain, and Ferry deletes ...”

“... a young literary lion, an acquaintance of Rousseau and Voltaire, the close friend, not just of Samuel Johnson, but of a broad sample of London’s cultural and fashionable élite, the celebrated biographer of the Corsican nationalist, Pasquale Paoli, a man, or so it seemed, to watch. Yet Boswell repeatedly failed. He failed to get into the Guards. He ...”

“... Joseph Johnson​ was fourteen when he arrived in London from Everton, Lancashire in 1753. He came to be apprenticed to George Keith, a bookseller in Gracechurch Street in the City. This was Hogarth’s London, a scene of dirty streets and dark alleys in which impressionable young people were met off the coach by an expectant crowd of brothel keepers, cutpurses and card sharps ...”

“... may have many gratifications but the comfort of life is at an end.’ His friend and master, Samuel Johnson, is dead. His ‘valuable spouse’, a spouse much deserted, has just suffered a slow and harrowing death from consumption, and he has to contend with expressions of sorrow and remorse: ‘the sad recollection of my irreparable loss hung at my ...”

“... Warton’s loveable dustiness, in contrast to Joseph’s interests in current taste. As his friend Samuel Johnson recognised, Thomas Warton’s poetic experiments were a branch of his antiquarianism. In his Life of Johnson, Boswell recalls defending the ‘strange’ diction and syntax of Warton’s poems by explaining ...”

“... odd will do for ever if the sensation-seekers have their way; Tristram Shandy has outlasted Johnson’s Dictionary, even in the classroom. Sterne was the first author to come up with fully explicatable – as distinct from explicable – texts, in English fiction anyway. His books are as necessary to the formalists as to the historians of feeling, and ...”

“... enlightenment were the wave of the future, which approached in evolutionary or discrete stages. Samuel Johnson, on his famous trip to the Highlands and outer islands in the middle of the 18th century, remarked upon the transformation of military chieftains into country gentlemen. Doubtless, he mused (a man of his time), there was something attractive ...”

“... What good anniversaries can 1981 and 1982 provide? Who was the second greatest Englishman, with Samuel Johnson indisputably the first? He notes, several times, that he has been likened to Macaulay – mistakenly, I think myself. True, both are Whigs, convinced that 1688 was the greatest thing before sliced bread, and both believe in English cultural ...”

“... Britain, as austerity and self-denial, those old-fashioned Protestant virtues, succumbed to what Samuel Johnson extolled as the ‘innocent pleasures’ of money-making. Acquisitive ‘passions’ previously condemned as venal and anti-social were revalued as ‘interests’, while ‘self-love’, that perennial target of Christian moralising, was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Jackson concludes in the plural that ‘readers . . . understood the caricatures of stereotypes in Johnson’s fictions to have been also portraits of individuals,’ one is tempted to rejoin that the marginalia from which she extrapolates this fact are the work of a single reader – and not just any reader. The annotator in question is Hester Thrale, whose ...”

“... of rougher trade, being marked by a kind of anti-intellectual wisdom, schooled in that harsh world Samuel Johnson endlessly held up to the face of the bon ton: ‘Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.’ Porter’s 18th century forms a counter-world to conventional evocations of that age. The expression ‘Georgian’ is meant to convey an 18th century ...”

“... What was it that Samuel Johnson said about Laurence Sterne’s unusual novel? ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’ I wonder whether the Doctor would have said the same had he lived long enough to reach the end of The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, whose odd title is only explained on page 584, when we come across a quote from The Alchemist ...”

“... and timeless. Smith bangs away at the lavish veneration post-war critics have bestowed on Samuel Johnson as a great authoritative grammarian of written English. There’s plainly a controversial aspect to what both are doing, but also a welcome constructiveness. Publishers are flooding the market with rival interpretations, quick to write and ...”

“... husband in Suffolk – she enjoyed turning pupils’ names into riddles for the weekly newsletter. Samuel Johnson said this sort of writing was a waste of her ‘early cultivation’ and precocity, but it endeared countless boys to her for the rest of their lives. Names matter to women partly because theirs change in adulthood more often than ...”