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“... subaltern, without the bland solvent of self-righteous statesmanship. In fact, they’re from Samuel Johnson’s first book, A Voyage to Abyssinia (1735), an excellent and little-noticed edition of which, by Joel Gold, appeared in 1985. They come at the conclusion of a distressing episode in which an ‘old Mahometan troublemaker, ‘the master of our ...”

“... In his heyday, from the late Forties to around the start of William Glock’s regime at the Third Programme (afterwards Radio Three), Hans Keller’s vehement presence was a force for the good in English musical life. He represented at a high level old-style modern values – not exactly cosmopolitan (an important reservation to which I shall return) but emphatically not insular ...”

“... in London, only really switched on the power in the 1950s. Novelists such as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, John Hearne, Andrew Salkey and V.S. Naipaul were among the first voices from the outposts of Empire to talk back. Not for them ‘clapping his hands and stamping his feet’ in order to communicate, like Conrad’s fireman (‘and he had filed ...”

“... the OED and Webster’s Third – of indicating the social status of a word. Mencken confuses Samuel Johnson the writer with Dr Johnson the ogre and bully portrayed by Boswell. James Murray, the author of the OED, succumbed to the same confusion, perhaps, when in a dream he imagined that Johnson was speaking of his Dictionary and Boswell, in an impish ...”

“... The first time​ Tetty Porter met her future husband, Samuel Johnson, she told her daughter, Lucy, that she had never encountered a more ‘sensible’ man. Most readers assume she was praising Johnson’s sober, rational side; Leslie Stephen, writing in 1878, went so far as to commend Tetty’s penetrative ‘good sense’ for discerning the same quality in Johnson, despite his ‘grotesque appearance ...”

“... been found in an outhouse horribly slashed.1 The public in any case suspected the boy’s father, Samuel Kent, a known adulterer, and when the 16-year-old Constance was acquitted they turned against her accusers (she later admitted to the crime). For writers, the private detective was a neat solution to an untidy problem. He could uncover secrets and solve ...”

“... are actually yearning to be rumbled? Well, probably; or maybe not. Who, if anyone, did Samuel Pepys think he was fooling when he wrote, in his now famously transparent code, that ‘Yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra mi genus and did poner mi minu sub her jupes and toca su thigh’? (In a later entry, Pepys proudly records that Mrs ...”

“... little of the image-smashing of which he was retrospectively accused. The decision of the empress Irene to rule in her own right from 797 to 802 provided one excuse – the throne was vacant, since a woman could not be emperor – for the proclamation of Charlemagne as emperor of the Romans at Christmas 800. During the rule of Nicephorus I ...”

“... speech, and enjoys retailing it to friends. At a party for Douglas Fairbanks Jr, he recounts Samuel Goldwyn’s overheard malapropism: ‘Since the last time I saw you, we’ve passed a lot of water under the bridge!’ Even so, the letters contain moments of his own incidental, almost Firbankean hilarity: ‘Linda is in wonderful form in spite of almost ...”

“... even figure in the top hundred. Andrew and Robert are barely hanging on. But Joshua, Benjamin, Samuel and Joseph have been restored to the places they held two hundred years ago, after languishing for years in the unfashionable regions of the charts. It is even possible to trace the rise of particular combinations of sounds. The popularity of J-names for ...”