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“... Christopher Hitchens may not be ‘the nearest thing to a one-man band since I.F. Stone laid down his pen’, but he comes close. For the Sake of Argument records a life of action, of being in the right place at the right time. Thomas Mann could never find the revolution: Hitchens cannot help tripping over it. This is, no doubt, the privilege of the foreign correspondent, but some are clearly more privileged than others ...”

“... even bother with the sub-Freudian niceties of an Abse, preferring to sink straight to Paul Johnson’s level and to say that there is an axiomatic, Forsterian connection between homosexual and traitorous deportment. To clear Tom on this charge, then, is a matter of journalistic and political hygiene. But it still leaves the matter of misogyny and ...”

“... self-server and mass-murderer Robert McNamara. He recalled an occasion, quite early in the Lyndon Johnson presidency, when Jackie had come up to him at a reception in New York and beaten her fists on his chest, calling on him to stop the killing in Vietnam. Of course, one could object and say that she never took her prestige and committed it publicly against ...”

“... the vicinity of Voltaire, have been able to write as well as they have done about Conrad and about Johnson just because their respect for the Enlightenment has never been so fatuous as to ‘suppose that dangerous irrationality is peculiar to religious life.’ And Davie is left clutching at straw men: ‘Stamp it out [dangerous irrationality] there, by ...”

“... to a Scarfe cartoon of Harold Wilson with his lolling tongue in close proximity to Lyndon Johnson’s bottom (‘Vietnam: Wilson right behind Johnson’, 30 April 1965). ‘I’ve heard of a special relationship,’ the president muses, hitching up his trousers, ‘but this is ridiculous.’ Somehow the exquisite ...”

“... 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 Johnson’s ...”

“... At​ the Tory Party Conference last year Boris Johnson claimed that his mother, Charlotte, was the ‘ace up his sleeve’ on Brexit. She had, he said, voted to leave the European Union in 2016, and was ‘the supreme authority in my family’. I went to Oxford in 1960 from Stonyhurst, the Jesuit boarding school, and in the vacation at the end of my first term met Charlotte Fawcett in the Café des Artistes, a basement club in Fulham ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... took a little too much pleasure in the delinquencies she spotted. She once stole a badge from Christopher Hitchens that said ‘All the Right Enemies’. Choosing whom to hate is an exact science for the enterprising biographer. With an excessive and portable moral hauteur, the intrepid muckraker tends to find subjects whose awfulness plays well with the ...”

“... a few resounding triumphs, such as this.’ This is an admission comparable in its dignity to Dr Johnson’s return upon himself in the matter of Paradise Lost and blank verse: ‘I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer.’ Empson does not prevail on himself. His glancingly intelligent gloss on intelligence came when he praised ...”

“... of factual detail.’ How smartly the syntax moves on through that stodginess (Boswell’s life of Johnson? Forster’s life of Dickens? Carlyle’s life of Sterling?), and then preserves its own freedom of manoeuvre with the unassimilated acknowledgement embodied in the words ‘stupefying doses’. Hartman regularly couches his adverse criticisms ...”

“... In his first book, Milton’s Grand Style, Christopher Ricks showed us that Milton wanted his readers to be attentive to the fact that when our ‘first parents’ fell, their language fell with them. Paradise Lost could only have been written in the language we were left with after the catastrophe, but is partly about the language we started with, and what happened to it ...”

“... As for his secret Spials, which he did employ both at home and abroad, by them to discover what Practices and Conspiracies were against him, surely his Case required it: He had such Moles perpetually working and casting to undermine him. Neither can it be reprehended. For if Spials be lawful against lawful Enemies, much more against Conspirators and Traytors ...”

“... Alecture​ by the critic Christopher Ricks, now in his late eighties, is a properly theatrical affair. There is much leaning forward on the lectern, legs often crossed; hand frequently raised with intensity to brow (often furrowed, especially when quoting statements of folly); sheets of paper flipped away as though unnecessary to the performance (if you catch a glimpse of them they seem to contain little more than a word or a quotation), such paper flurries occurring particularly at times when in the sober medium of prose one might notice a hiccup or a rough conjunction in argument; meanwhile a building sweat, spreading from the armpits but also on the ample brow, conveys that this is stuff that gets the pulse racing ...”

“... not quite the first, being preceded by an abandoned attempt to write a play about the life of Dr Johnson); when there was some discussion of a Pléiade edition of the collected works, he expressly withheld Eleutheria. It is not hard to see why. It is an exercise in experimental drama that doesn’t come off, largely because it is so programmatically ...”