Not tired of this life

Philip Hensher on Peter Martin’s biography of Samuel Johnson

Thanks to Boswell’s inexhaustibly interesting biography, Samuel Johnson is deeply familiar to us, even in his most extreme eccentricities. It’s easy to forget how bizarre and alarming he must have seemed to most of his contemporaries. His involuntary movements were such that modern scholars have often wondered whether he might not have had Tourette’s syndrome. Sir Joshua Reynolds’ sister Frances records a distressing afternoon in Twickenham when he broke into ‘antics both with his feet and hands, with the latter as if he was holding the reins of a horse like a jockey on full speed’. In that more robust age, ‘men, women and children gathered round him, laughing’.

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James Kirkup

Starmer’s grooming gang stance might not last the weekend

Even to the 18th century, he seemed remarkably dirty — almost everyone who met him commented on it.