Jacques Derrida was born in 1930 in El-Biar near Algiers. He read Henri Bergson and Jean-Paul Sartre in philosophy class at the Lycée Gauthier in Algiers and then encountered Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, the reading of whom pushed him to study philosophy rather than literature. In 1949 he moved to France, attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and then studied at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), where he later taught for the first twenty years of his career. Beginning philosophical life as a phenomenologist, he soon invented a post-phenomenological style of thinking he called ‘deconstruction’. Beginning in 1966, with a visit to Johns Hopkins University, Derrida often spent several weeks each year teaching in the United States, most notably at Yale and the University of California, Irvine.

In 1980 Derrida successfully defended his these d'état at the Sorbonne, and in 1983 served as the inaugural director of the Collège International de Philosophie while also moving from the ENS to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s he travelled extensively, speaking in Africa, Australia, Europe, Israel, Latin America, Japan and the Soviet Union. A prolific writer, as well as a stylish one, his publications embrace questions of art, literature, politics, psychoanalysis and religion. He died of cancer in 2004.

Most contributions to the philosophy of religion in the twentieth century consist of attempts to develop a new position, or to criticize an old position, with respect to one or more inherited problems: the existence of God, the rationality of belief, the possibility of religious experience, the nature of religious language and so on.

The poetic sequence

Chances are that the word 'sequence' when used of English poetry will first conjure the Elizabethan sonnet sequence, beginning with Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1582), and including Spenser's Amoretti (1595) and Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609). Not all the sequences of the Golden Age are wholly devoted to the sonnet - Sidney's has ten songs in addition to 108 sonnets, and Spenser concludes his eighty-eight sonnets with 'Epithalamion' - but the sonnet is certainly the dominant form. Each sequence is held together by a complex theme, love, and a loose drama or narrative development: unhappiness in an erotic relationship or, with Spenser, eventual marital bliss. Variation in theme notably occurs with Donne's 'Holy Sonnets' (1610-11), while George Herbert's The Temple (1633) presents a booklength sequence of religious lyrics only some of which are sonnets, and which is structured as much by reference to church architecture as by a narrative of spiritual development. The lyrical sequence detached itself from the sonnet sequence at an early stage, although it took several centuries to find its characteristic level as a medium-length-to-long poem that links together lyrics in a variety of stanzaic patterns.

Adjustments to the sonnet form by George Meredith in Modern Love (1862) opened the way for further (mostly deferred) experiments in the sonnet sequence, not all of which were successful. A century after Meredith, Robert Lowell wrote several volumes of fourteen-liners without rhyme or metre, of which very few individual poems have proved memorable.

Johnson composed his elegy ‘On the Death of Dr Robert Levett’ (1783) only a year before his own demise. It is one of his most piercing works, and holds a special place in his canon. Coming very late in his writing life, the elegy condenses many of the concerns of his periodical essays, fiction and verse. It is not simply a powerful act of compression, a final summation of a lifetime's wisdom: one or two familiar Johnsonian themes are delicately adjusted, and for once we hear him speak in a public voice of a domestic companion. Experience of old age has scarcely softened his central theme of the vanity of human wishes. We are told in no uncertain terms that we are ‘condemn'd to hope's delusive mine’, and the generality and weight of the line are wholly familiar to his readers. Even so, there is something in these stanzas that I feel only in a handful of his most private and heart-rending letters and prayers. It is as though all that is condensed in his petition ‘let my life be useful, and my death be happy’ (Yale, I, 66) is re-cast in the third person and in the past: Levett's life was useful, his death was happy. One could call this quality ‘emotion’ or ‘experience’, but it would be inadequate and misleading to rest there, and words like ‘directness’ and ‘personal’ are hardly sufficient in themselves.

‘No action in his life became him like the leaving it. His death makes a kind of era in literature. Piety and goodness will not easily find a more able defender, and it is delightful to see him set, as it were, his dying seal to the profession of his life, and to the truth of Christianity.’ So wrote Hannah More of her friend Samuel Johnson in 1785, and literary historians have generally agreed with her, even without knowing it, in calling his times ‘the Age of Johnson’. For More, Johnson's death and the era whose limits it reveals are characterised by a religious faith strongly operating in both the private and the public spheres. ‘Literature’, here, is meant as Johnson defined it in the Dictionary, ‘Learning; skill in letters’, a sense derived from the Latin that was slowly fading from use even as she wrote. The power of invention that Johnson believed to be the heart of poetry, and that would soon become the hub of literature understood as creative or imaginative writing, is not the issue. Johnson is exemplary, she thinks, by dint of the moral and religious ends to which he put his learning; and the manner of his death brings his life and writings into complete harmony.

Lewis Namier once grandly observed that ‘every country and every age has dominant terms, which seem to obsess men's thoughts. Those of eighteenth-century England were property, contract, trade, and profits’. Someone unprepared to follow Namier in taking such an extensive view might say that he is running different things together. This person might be tempted to quote Edmund Burke's distinction between property as ‘sluggish, inert, and timid’ and ability as ‘a vigorous and active principle’. And he or she might then ask, what are ‘contract, trade, and profits’ if not the lawful struggles of ability against the interests of landed property? Namier would doubtless concede that estates were sluggish in eighteenth-century England and defend himself by pointing out that as the century wore on property became less a matter of land than of moveable wealth: banknotes, bills of credit, stock. This association of property and paper is the main reason why so many acts of parliament under the Hanoverians were passed concerning forgery, and why the punishments set for these crimes were so severe. There was no rigid distinction between ‘property’, on the one hand, and ‘contract, trade, and profits’, on the other. Appropriations and expropriations of ability and resources, both local and foreign, brought a teeming world of commerce into being, and from time to time this new wealth came to be invested in landed property.

‘There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property.’ So declares William Blackstone, the first Vinerian Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford, in his magisterial Commentaries (1765–69). Property, he goes on to say, is ‘that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe’. Having gone so far, he is moved to open the Bible, citing Genesis 1: 28, which he calls ’the only true and solid foundation of man's dominion over external things’. It is rare to find Blackstone evoking the imagination or expressing such a sense of awe. And yet it is understandable here: for he is confronting the ground and abyss of his great theme. The laws of England, as gathered and ordered by him, are at heart an affirmation and elaboration of the right to property.

That property is a natural right, established at the level of the individual rather than the State, is the burden of John Locke's eloquent remarks on the subject in his Two Treatises of Government (1690). To say that his theory of property was influential would be a tepid understatement; it formed a horizon for all discussions of law and society in eighteenth-century Britain, including Blackstone's lectures.

‘On Saturday the fourteenth of August, 1773, late in the evening, I received a note from him, that he was arrived at Boyd's inn, at the head of the Canongate. I went to him directly. He embraced me cordially …’ (Tour, 21). Neither Johnson nor Boswell opens his recollection of the Hebridean ramble with this scene, and yet the jaunt begins here, with Boswell collecting his friend at the local coach stop. Or does it? If we are looking for the jaunt's true starting point, perhaps we should go back several months and focus on Boswell soliciting help in getting Johnson to stir from London. Invitations were sought from the Scottish chiefs Macdonald and MacLeod, and letters were written to James Beattie, Lord Elibank, William Robertson and Hester Thrale. Or perhaps we should go back decades earlier, before Boswell was born, and view the young Johnson in his father's bookshop engrossed in reading Martin Martin's A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1703). For Boswell, as he approaches Boyd's inn, it hardly matters who or what has helped to bring his friend up north. Seeing Johnson in Scotland is for him a tonic satisfaction. A line from his journal says it all: ‘I exulted in the thought, that I now had him actually in Caledonia’ (Tour, 21).

Something in that last phrase recalls another scene at another inn, Hayward's in London.

There have always been people who have felt uneasy about Boswell's biographical writing, even while admiring its freshness and vivacity. Sometimes this unease centres on the image of Boswell erasing himself in order to present Johnson. Here, they say, is admiration taken to a dangerous extreme: if Boswell becomes Johnsonianissimus he is, in a plain and important sense, failing to be himself. Sometimes, however, the unease comes from the reverse side of this image. The complaint here is that Boswell does not erase himself sufficiently when writing about his friend and mentor. This objection is usually made by people who style themselves as Johnsonians, and we have already heard the tenor of their concern: the Life not only appropriates Johnson, transforming a favoured author into a mere character, but also misappropriates him. The Life, they say, is too partial and too skewed to be regarded as authoritative biography, and they suggest that we seek out a Johnson without Boswell. Usually the intention is to restore Johnson as an author so that we may appreciate his writing and be challenged by his ideas. On occasion, though, there is another intention: to replace the Life with a more comprehensive biography, one that does justice to the early years, corrects falsifications, and that offers perspectives on the later years that Boswell was unable or unwilling to give.

Let us return to Carlyle for a moment. The hero as man of letters is a new phenomenon, he says, a man who rules from his grave. Why new? He tells us in the very first phrase of the passage I quoted in the last chapter, ‘He, with his copy-rights …’ The man of letters is not someone who simply interprets the ‘Divine Idea’, he has a secular legal existence as well. Two codes are at work here, and if we go back to 1759 we can see them cross one another in a manner that was to seem natural for later generations: ‘let not great examples, or authorities, browbeat thy reason into too great a diffidence of thyself: Thyself so reverence, as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad; such borrowed riches make us poor.’ This is Edward Young in his Conjectures on Original Composition, and his message is plain: the true genius looks within for inspiration. No sooner are we directed inside ourselves, though, than we find ourselves returned to the market place. ‘The man who thus reverences himself, will soon find the world's reverence to follow his own. His works will stand distinguished; his the sole property of them; which property alone can confer the noble title of an author; that is, of one who (to speak accurately) thinks, and composes; while other invaders of the press, how voluminous, and learned soever, (with due respect be it spoken) only read, and write.’