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“... and self-deception. Adrian Oldfield’s eloquent evocation of the civic republican tradition and Jonathan Boswell’s path-breaking analysis of the links between the values of community and the imperatives of an advanced economy should be read against this background. They exemplify the same tentative but unmistakable new paradigm. Both are what ...”

“... the more militant gesture for gay men. Likewise books that glorify homosexuals as outlaws, like Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence, have caused scarcely a ripple outside the literary critical lagoon, but when John Boswell, a rather old-fashioned medieval historian, claimed to have discovered evidence for gay ...”

“... recently, the art of modern biography was too little influenced by the man who invented it, James Boswell, and, even today, many of those who set out to write the lives of authors seem to be led by a suspicion that everything of interest about the subject might already have been said by the subject himself. The literary biographer is haunted by Nabokov’s ...”

“... and pilloried for publishing supposedly treasonable works whose authors remained concealed. Being Jonathan Swift’s printer was not a job for the faint-hearted. John Locke fearlessly inscribed his name on the title page of his Essay concerning Human Understanding, but went to great and fearful lengths to preserve the anonymity of his more political ...”

“... did to pass the time, what they thought about Italian opera, why they were so fascinated with Jonathan Wild, what exactly went wrong in the South Sea Bubble, and why Swift’s Laputa has more to do with money-making gadgetry than with the Royal Society and its proceedings. Rogers’s trust in facts is such that he often appears content to be what Kenner ...”

“... the bourgeois ‘bad taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this overstuffed ...”

“... nor the talent to be a serious chronicler de nos jours. The only time in my life I tried to do a Boswell was after an evening on which Elias Canetti had unexpectedly invited himself to supper with us alone. But when, the following morning, I looked through the notes of his conversation which I’d made before going to bed, I found myself quite incapable of ...”

“... who took no delight in the sea. Johnson’s views on the sailor’s life are well known, and here Boswell, describing their voyage from Skye to Coll, states that he was ‘quite in a state of annihilation’. Coleridge, going to sea for the first time (he had already written ‘The Ancient Mariner’), was exceedingly disappointed; and Lamb, in a ...”

“... of a fashionable metropolis. Pleasure gardens were real places, visited by Fanny Burney and James Boswell as well as by characters in novels. They were also places of the imagination, whether that imagination was appalled or enraptured. They were the inventions of a society of conspicuous consumption (‘luxury’ in the old parlance) and leisure, a society ...”

“... men who made London culture in his lifetime in being a native – Johnson and Garrick, Smollett, Boswell and Samuel Richardson were all incomers. Uglow makes telling use of Hogarth’s progress across the capital, from Smithfield to Covent Garden, from the city to ‘the town’ and from trade to art. Not that the distance between the latter was so great. In ...”

“... Jacobite sympathies of the period without much involving Johnson.) The longest piece by far is Jonathan Clark’s essay on ‘Samuel Johnson as a Nonjuror’, which pursues further some of the evidence for Johnson’s true allegiances used in his 1994 book on the Great Cham. The key claim here is that Johnson left Oxford University early not, as has ...”

“... were consumed not only by dilettantes or libertines, like Horace Walpole, John Wilkes and James Boswell, but also by landowners, clerics and society hostesses – Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s confidante, owned several jestbooks and comic miscellanies. In this context it becomes easier – though still not entirely easy – to understand the ...”

“... longer sounds sarcastic or self-mocking. Today, the nearest blue plaque is a few doors down, where Boswell first ran into Johnson 19 years after Haywood left. But if you’ve ever browsed in the WC2 branch of East, a fashion chain, you’ve stood on the exact spot. Even so, the disreputable old Haywood can’t be killed off entirely. It’s hard not to wonder ...”

“... however, they were paramount. Here they eclipsed outlaw heroes of folk tradition – Dick Turpin, Jonathan Wild, Dick Sheppard – and usurped the leadership of the police in the fight against delinquency and disorder. The prolific Stephen Knight has calculated that Sherlock Holmes had at least 13 predecessors, some of them women. Most were quickly ...”

“... establishment are presented as a perfect image of American business organisation. The Yale Boswell industry, for example, is described as an editorial project ‘on the model of American corporate enterprise’ funded by the Mellon banking fortunes. The American Society for 18th-Century Studies, with its regional subsidiaries, its journal and ...”