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Marks of Inferiority

Freya Johnston: Wollstonecraft’s Distinction, 4 February 2021

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion and Politics 
by Sylvana Tomaselli.
Princeton, 230 pp., £25, December 2020, 978 0 691 16903 3
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... our sex ought to endeavour to attain in the world.’ Six years before Wollstonecraft was born, Samuel Johnson had remarked, at once facetiously and in earnest, on the rise of ‘a generation of Amazons of the pen, who … have set masculine tyranny at defiance, asserted their claim to the regions of science, and seem resolved to contest the ...

Downfalls

Karl Miller, 5 February 1987

Another Day of Life 
by Ryszard Kapuściński.
Picador, 136 pp., £8.95, February 1987, 0 330 29844 5
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... that this is a country of the mind, constructed on principles no different from those of the Samuel Johnson who devised, for the Abyssinia of Rasselas, just representations of general truths and a common humanity. From Abyssinia Kapuściński passed to Persia. From Rasselas, as it were, to Ozymandias. Present in the second book as the occupant of an ...

Dreams of Avarice

Patrick Parrinder, 29 August 1991

A Closed Eye 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 255 pp., £13.99, August 1991, 0 224 03090 6
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Underwood and After 
by Ronald Frame.
Hodder, 246 pp., £14.99, August 1991, 0 340 55359 6
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Lemprière’s Dictionary 
by Lawrence Norfolk.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 530 pp., £14.95, August 1991, 1 85619 053 6
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... air of drudgery that has surrounded lexicography since the time of Lemprière’s fellow alumnus Samuel Johnson, by inventing for his hero a series of mind-bogglingly lurid adventures. London, not Oxford, is the scene of our protagonist’s literary efforts, and the sinister Nazim, official assassin to the Nawab of the Carnatic – one of the many ...

Language Fears

Walter Nash, 19 January 1989

Good English and the Grammarian 
by Sidney Greenbaum.
Longman, 152 pp., £6.95, February 1988, 0 582 29148 8
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Longman Guide to English Usage 
by Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut.
Longman, 786 pp., £10.95, June 1988, 0 582 55619 8
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Words in Time: A Social History of the English Vocabulary 
by Geoffrey Hughes.
Blackwell, 270 pp., £14.95, May 1988, 0 631 15832 4
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... do not list it, but my attention was recently drawn to the word maund, which my informant said Samuel Johnson had taken up from the dialect collections of the naturalist John Ray. I looked up maund in Johnson’s Dictionary. It is defined very concisely, as ‘a hand ...

The New Phrenology

Patrick Wall, 17 December 1981

Mind in Science 
by Richard Gregory.
Weidenfeld, 641 pp., £18.50, September 1981, 0 297 77825 0
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... with a quotation from Boscoe Pertwee: ‘I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure.’ Samuel Johnson warned people not to make jokes at their own expense because others will use them seriously. I am impressed and excited by the great sweep of development over the centuries so far as the understanding of mind in science is concerned: but ...

The Name of the Beast

Armand Marie Leroi, 11 December 1997

Buffon 
by Jacques Roger.
Cornell, 492 pp., £39.50, August 1997, 0 8014 2918 8
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The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination 
by Harriet Ritvo.
Harvard, 274 pp., £19.95, November 1997, 0 674 67357 3
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... not calculated to appeal to a wider audience. ‘Goldsmith is writing a Natural History,’ Samuel Johnson said to Boswell, ‘and you can be sure that he will make it as entertaining as a Persian Tale.’ So he did, turning naturally to Buffon for his material and method. Like the Histoire naturelle, Oliver Goldsmith’s History of the Earth and ...

Learned Insane

Simon Schaffer: The Lunar Men, 17 April 2003

The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 588 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 571 19647 0
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... from the vicious exercises of the Lunar world to serving the urbanities of Fanny Burney and Samuel Johnson. Sometimes, Lunar women got their own back: one subverted Withering’s strenuous fungus hunts by painting on field mushrooms, then handing over the surprisingly coloured results to the easily fooled naturalist. Fashion mattered almost as much ...

Valet of the Dolls

Andrew O’Hagan: Sinatra, 24 July 2003

Mr S.: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra 
by George Jacobs and William Stadiem.
Sidgwick, 261 pp., £16.99, June 2003, 0 283 07370 5
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... There was only one other person in the life of Samuel Johnson who stood a chance of writing a biography as entertaining as Boswell’s. Francis Barber was overqualified by modern standards, and too loyal for the job in any era, but for more than thirty years he was Johnson’s (black) manservant ...

Rose on the Run

Andrew O’Hagan: Beryl Bainbridge, 14 July 2011

The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress 
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Little, Brown, 197 pp., £16.99, May 2011, 978 0 316 72848 5
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... from each other. She found one in the mind of Hester Thrale’s eldest daughter – observing Samuel Johnson in According to Queeney – and another in the Antarctic of Scott’s famous expedition. Five people told that tale, in The Birthday Boys, but they were all Beryl. On a good day, a novelist will find little parts of himself everywhere in ...

Masters

Christopher Ricks, 3 May 1984

Swift: The Man, His Works and the Age: Vol III. Dean Swift 
by Irvin Ehrenpreis.
Methuen, 1066 pp., £40, December 1983, 0 416 85400 1
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Swift’s Tory Politics 
by F.P. Lock.
Duckworth, 189 pp., £18, November 1983, 0 7156 1755 9
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Jonathan Swift: Political Writer 
by J.A. Downie.
Routledge, 391 pp., £25, March 1984, 0 7100 9645 3
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The Character of Swift’s Satire 
edited by Claude Rawson.
Associated University Presses, 343 pp., £22.50, April 1984, 0 87413 209 6
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... point to the frequency of such reversals in Swift; in his dealings with Esther Johnson and Mrs Dingley, even while ‘establishing for himself a fantasy family in which he might act father, brother, lover or husband as he chose’, Swift ‘was also reversing the old relationship which once made him dependent upon two women’. Reversing is ...

Pistols in His Petticoats

Neal Ascherson: The Celebrated Miss Flora, 15 December 2022

Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald 
by Flora Fraser.
Bloomsbury, 285 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 4088 7982 5
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... Stumbling​ out of the pouring rain on the Isle of Skye, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson found a welcome in the house of Allan MacDonald at Kingsburgh. Dr Johnson had developed a nasty cold; Boswell was wet and thirsty and delighted to get indoors. ‘There was a comfortable parlour,’ he wrote in his journal in the autumn of 1773, ‘with a good fire, and a dram of admirable Hollands gin went round ...

For his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields

Michael Dobson: The Yellow Shakespeare, 10 May 2007

William Shakespeare, Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare 
edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.
Macmillan, 2486 pp., £30, April 2007, 978 0 230 00350 7
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... with the corrections and illustrations of Various Commentators; To which are added notes by Sam. Johnson. This edition, with its much reprinted preface and doggedly commonsensical approach to the text, still exerts a palpable influence on Shakespeare scholars: Jonathan Bate’s introduction to this new edition of the Complete Works makes regular appeals to ...

In a Spa Town

James Wood: ‘A Hero of Our Time’, 11 February 2010

A Hero of Our Time 
by Mikhail Lermontov, translated by Natasha Randall.
Penguin, 174 pp., £8.99, August 2009, 978 0 14 310563 3
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... When Samuel Johnson, travelling in the Highlands with James Boswell, reaches Loch Ness, he is so overwhelmed by the massiveness of the landscape that the heavy order of his prose is briefly disarrayed. On his right, there are high and steep rocks, and on his left deep water laps against the bank in ‘gentle agitation ...

Mixed Up

Joanna Kavenna: In the génocidaire’s wake, 3 March 2005

The Optimists 
by Andrew Miller.
Sceptre, 313 pp., £16.99, March 2005, 9780340825129
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... ham actors the lot of them, with decayed teeth and rasping voices. Casanova laments his lot to Samuel Johnson. He is a vividly seedy lover, Johnson a polysyllabic agony uncle; and around them whirls a cast of women for sale, rapacious aunts and mothers, and gentlemen bartering their mistresses over tea. Casanova ...

A Smile at My Own Temerity

John Barrell: William Hogarth, 16 February 2017

William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings 
by Elizabeth Einberg.
Yale, 432 pp., £95, November 2016, 978 0 300 22174 9
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... everywhere else as “license”, is called in England by the august name of “liberty”.’ Samuel Johnson would make the point still clearer in his essay ‘The Bravery of the English Common Soldiers’. Why is it, he asked, that the ‘English vulgar’ make such excellent soldiers, willing to follow wherever their officers lead? It was not, he ...

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