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“... when the single-minded Becky Sharp, high in a coach bound for Russell Square, flings a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary out of the window to land on the grass at the feet of her former teacher, a sworn disciple of the Great Lexicographer. ‘So much for the Dictionary,’ says Becky Sharp as the carriage pulls away, ‘and, thank God, I’m out of ...”

“... On 16 June 1783, Samuel Johnson was rendered speechless by a stroke. His first action was not to try croaking for a doctor, but to compose a prayer in Latin: ‘The lines were not very good, but I knew them not to be very good: I made them easily, and concluded myself to be unimpaired in my faculties.’ Johnson was relieved that he could still pray in Latin, but the greater part of his relief was that he was still enough of a critic to know that his verses were not much good ...”

“... cluttered with decanters and after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group ...”

“... In March 1776, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather ...”

“... Announcing the winner of this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize, Andrew Marr was pleased to be able to say that none of the shortlisted books was the obvious result of a publisher’s ‘wheeze’, or the so-called biography of something which couldn’t in all honesty be said ever to have had a life. One of the more glaring recent additions to the latter category is Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography by Dominic Streatfeild (Virgin, £20 ...”

“... open-ended. For a Modernist writer like Bertolt Brecht change in itself is a good, just as for Samuel Johnson change was in itself an evil. Bad things were reified products; good things were dynamically evolving processes. This piece of Romantic banality never went entirely unchallenged. If Pascal was still able to glimpse in space an unsettling ...”

“... enough) ... that Mr Parr had called,’ an odd subconscious aggression, perhaps, against Samuel Parr, ‘the Whig Dr Johnson’, with whom as it happens he dined later in the volume, and who himself spoke of writing a life of Johnson. Boswell apparently never saw M.C. again and ...”

“... piece of heterosexual erotica for the rest of his days. A shopkeeper with the splendid name of Samuel Drybutter, who was once thought to have written the only sodomitical passage in Fanny Hill, and who was killed by the mob as a sodomite himself, may have been a friend of Cleland. In his time in Bombay, Cleland also defended a raped and enslaved Indian ...”

“... or editing. Very little English literary criticism has lasted as long or worn as well as Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. It shaped the canon of English poetry and set the terms for critical discussion of Donne, Milton, Dryden, Swift and Pope over at least two centuries. This is all the more amazing given that its own life began ...”

“... Goldsmith as ‘an awkward, improvident and slightly ridiculous Irishman … whose genius [Johnson] nevertheless acknowledged and championed’ – though in fact almost every reference to Goldsmith in the Life of Samuel Johnson itself belittles him. Boswell was not alone. After Goldsmith’s death in 1774 ...”

“... Hacking writes. ‘So far as I’m concerned, if you can spray them then they are real.’ Samuel Johnson long ago made the same argument. (‘If you can kick them, then they are real.’) Of course, Johnson didn’t actually say anything like this, but when he ‘refuted’ Berkeley by kicking a stone he was ...”

“... Earlier this year, Andrew Marr certified it dead. (He was announcing the shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction at the time. His verdict may prove to be no less premature than Johnson’s pronouncement on Sterne: ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’) Responding to ...”

“... modern music was a long-cherished ambition of Giuseppi Baretti, the Italian writer and friend of Samuel Johnson, who had lived in London since 1751. After much thought, Baretti commissioned the music from François-André Danican Philidor, the French operatic composer (celebrated also for his prowess at chess). Philidor worked in Paris on what was to be ...”

“... and usefully. ‘A man cannot hem a pocket-handkerchief,’ a ‘lady of quality’ said to Samuel Johnson one day, ‘and so he runs mad, and torments his family and friends.’ The anecdote is recounted by Mrs Thrale. Johnson, it appears, was much impressed and, in Mrs Thrale’s telling, ‘when one ...”

“... Bristol in search of Chatterton’s ghost (‘I paced about, in the footsteps of Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell and many others . . .’), for all the world like a print version of Simon Schama. One can almost see the make-up and microphone. It is a smart rather than deep study, with more wit than soul. Groom’s rather predictably ...”