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“... In​ autumn 2000, the critic, memoirist and biographer James Atlas brought forth a Life of Saul Bellow that augured to be the literary event of the season, a crowning glory for author and subject. Bellow: A Biography was Atlas’s highly anticipated successor to his wunderkind biography of the brilliant, bedevilled Delmore Schwartz, whose combustible presence served as the inspiration for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Humboldt’s Gift ...”

“... accepted by the Royal Academy after the Hanging Committee had rejected it. (Carlyle, who knew his Boswell, would have remembered that this was the occasion of one of Johnson’s rare dicta in art criticism. ‘Sir,’ he told Lowe, ‘your picture is noble and probable.’) There are the inevitable health bulletins from Chelsea: ‘Unluckily until Death ...”

“... He had never had a moment when death was not terrible to him,’ reports Boswell on the occasion of needling his famous friend with the news that the atheist philosopher David Hume had died well and without repentance. ‘The horror of death, which I had always observed in Dr Johnson, appeared strong tonight.’ Sherwin Nuland a surgeon from Yale, speaks to the Johnson in each of us, to our hunger for knowledge of our inevitable end: ‘Everyone wants to know the details of dying ...”

“... that it reinstated a godlike Cartesian cogito. ‘From the theoretical point of view,’ James Miller quotes him as saying, ‘Sartre avoids the idea of the self as something which is given to us; but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves – to be truly our self.’ One feels inclined to ...”

“... 18th-century prophet Joanna Southcott in a manuscript imitation of the printed glosses in the King James Bible. To pigeonhole such books as the ‘work of nutters’ contributes nothing towards a systematic theory of marginalia – except, perhaps, the insight that marginalia lend themselves to both marginalised people (those who have no access to publishing ...”

“... the year Balzac wrote Cousin Pons, Verdi wrote Macbeth, Berlioz composed The Damnation of Faust, James Simpson first successfully used chloroform, the German Gustav Kirchhoff spelled out the laws of electric currents in a network of wires and Carl Zeiss opened an optics factory in Jena, Switzerland. It was the year Alfred Krupp cast his first steel gun and ...”

“... kangaroo, had on British zoology following the return of the Endeavour, the ship that carried James Cook and Joseph Banks to Australia. These animals became, in the course of the 19th century, the focus of disputes about mammalian classification. Darwin thought they might well be viewed as links between mammals, birds and reptiles. His bête ...”

“... of their own aspirations – despite modern prejudices against absolute monarchy and murder. James Mackay, for example, prefaces his own account of the Queen with similar remarks about her current significance: I make no apology for offering this fresh look at Mary. Writing in the aftermath of the devolution debate and referendum, I have been forcibly ...”

“... was travelling on the muddy highways and muddier byways of England and Scotland, a young poet, James Thomson (b. 1700), was roaming the cold hills of Scotland. Defoe, who toured through the area where James Thomson was born, thought little of it: agriculture in Roxburghshire was in a pitiful state, the people suffering a ...”

“... Blacks in Britain was held in the same year, at the University of London. Studies by Peter Fryer, James Walvin and David Dabydeen appeared in the next few years. Fryer, whose Staying Power is still the most detailed – and most often consulted – account of the subject, gave more than two hundred talks and lectures at adult education centres, schools and ...”

“... a shifting sense of communal responsibilities and values. So she reads together Dr Johnson and Boswell; Fanny Burney and minor female writers of Gothic fiction; the dread Hannah More together with a marvellous collection of lesser-known women (Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Delany) whose letters and diaries survived against the ...”

“... my own spectator and self-appreciator – critical, discerning, vigilant, fond! – my own stupid Boswell, shrewd if silly … I could botanise over my own grave, attentively examine the maggots out of my own brain.To the charge – his own – of immodesty, he has the defence of scientific disinterest: what could be less vain than offering oneself up for ...”

“... scandal was just one among several writerly modes. Two years after her death, her former associate James Ralph wrote The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated, a landmark treatise about literary property and professional authorship in the post-patronage marketplace. If Haywood is exemplary of anything now, it’s not dashed-off erotica with a life to ...”

“... early life, so that we see, not only Grieve the friend of Red Clydesiders John MacLean and James Maxton, but also the Grieve whose Scottish nationalism was encouraged by his rejection by English girls. Heady on his home-brew of Nietzsche, John Davidson, and almost any other literary material he could devour, this proto-MacDiarmid emerges as something ...”

“... line of contact between several of these figures: four of them were the subjects of biographies by James Boaden (1762-1839), who happened also to edit Garrick’s letters. Ms Kelly mentions these lives in her preface, and one might almost suppose that the spur for writing this book came to her from the arrival of a hoard of Boaden volumes from a relative’s ...”