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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 ...”

“... life about him – ‘the continuous traffic of piety’. One of the most striking things about Samuel Johnson is the depth of his urge towards piety: not spirituality at every moment, but what we might today call ‘mere’ piety. His private diaries are written in the margin of the Christian year: feasts and fast-days provide a grid for his moral ...”

“... a topic on which I ran out of ideas twenty years ago. What I had in mind was to write about Dr Johnson, simply because I had promised myself to read Boswell’s Life of Johnson at least once a decade and on checking my reading-list found I had not done so. But how am I to get from nuclear bombs to ...”

“... decades that Boswell makes an unreliable guide to the mind of his mentor. They say that one tastes Johnson’s profundity not in his conversation but in his writing, and above all in the essays on morality. In those works, says W.J. Bate, ‘we have the essence of Johnson.’ A careful reader of the life by Boswell must ...”

“... I want to draw some connections between Samuel Johnson, the amateur doctor and enthusiast for medicine, and the Doctor Johnson who figures so largely in the cultural imagination ... If we focus on the figure of Samuel Johnson, the unco-ordinated, discontinuous events of 18th-century medicine will seem momentarily at least to converge ...”

“... Criticism,​ for Samuel Johnson, was female, her votaries for the most part malicious, ineffectual men. In an early issue of the Rambler from 1750, Criticism is presented as ‘the eldest daughter of Labour and of Truth’, charged by the Muses with distinguishing good from bad writing and duty-bound to confer immortality or oblivion ...”

“... Certain literary figures have attracted special scrutiny, in recent years none more so than Samuel Johnson. Samuel Johnson in Historical Context is a collection of essays pursuing a sometimes acrimonious debate which has taken place in academic books and journals over the last decade. To innocent student ...”

“... to Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). In short, was Swift a monster, as Samuel Johnson nearly said: ‘The greatest difficulty that occurs, in analysing his character, is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took delight in revolving ideas from which almost every other mind shrinks with disgust.’ Sixty years after ...”

“... On Saturday, July 30, Dr Johnson and I took a sculler at the Temple-stairs, and set out for Greenwich. I asked him if he really thought a knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages an essential requisite to a good education. JOHNSON. ‘Most certainly, sir; for those who know them have a very great advantage over those who do not ...”

“... James Boswell created the ‘Age of Johnson’, rescuing the late 18th century, above all, for the Victorians. The Boswell industry at Yale University has given an ‘Age of Boswell’ to the 20th century. This second volume of the grand Frederick Pottle-Frank Brady biography marks the climax of that long achievement ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... will predominate in every mind, till it has been suppressed by frequent disappointments. Samuel Johnson I turn left out of the rain at Kippo junction, the windshield clearing to sky and a skim of swallows over the road like the last few pages of a 50s story book where someone is walking home to the everafter, touched with the smell of the ...”

“... human beings tend to undergo, even those of reasonable health who are destined to make old bones. Johnson has all the 18th-century’s bluntness on matters of health. ‘The old flatulence distressed me again last night,’ he tells Hester Thrale in 1775, adding with comic intent: ‘The world is full of ups and downs, as I think I once told you before.’ In ...”

“... when he told of a Brother. Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, marginal annotation to Boswell’s Life of Johnson Here is a museum. Visitors may see in it Nero’s couch, a statue of Cerberus and a skeleton of an Ethiopian, the bones stuck with porcupine quills. Here is a cabinet of curiosities. In it are a ribbon pretending to have belonged to Frances Thrale (dead ...”

“... dictionaries is dull work.’ But they are fun to read, and it’s good to welcome this reprint of Johnson’s first edition (1755). No dictionary before Webster’s Third International has caused so much comment and controversy, none has been the cause of so many anecdotes and myths, as Johnson’s. Few dictionaries have ...”