Johnson lived through an age of financial speculation, unprecedented consumer spending and a rampant press. As has often been remarked, the new power of the press meant that celebrity culture had its origins in the 18th century: the antics of actresses and courtesans filled the gossip columns, while Garrick was the first genuinely international star actor. There were even celebrity criminals, such as Dr William Dodd, who ran out of credit and committed the capital offence of forging a bond in the name of the Earl of Chesterfield. Johnson, who crossed swords with Chesterfield himself over the question of literary patronage, did everything he could on Dodd's behalf, but there was no reprieve and the execution was a media event as baroque as the obsequies of Jade Goody or Michael Jackson.

It was also an age when the English did a good line in venal politicians. But, unlike some nations, we neither tolerated nor executed them. Thanks to satirists such as Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, we were just very good at exposing, excoriating and ridiculing them. Johnson's breakthrough in Grub Street came from his work as a parliamentary sketch writer. Since there were reporting restrictions on what was actually said in parliament, he took to making up the speeches and putting them into the mouths of the Honourable Members. His column in The Gentleman's Magazine was called "Reports of the Debates in the Senate of Lilliput."

In 1767 Johnson devoted his Idler magazine to an essay on "The Bravery of the English Common Soldiers." The French do leadership, the Prussians do military discipline, says Johnson, but what the English do best is courage on the part of the other ranks. The excellence of the British army, he suggests, is forged not on the playing fields of Eton but on the unruly Saturday night streets of our towns and cities: 

Whence then is the courage of the English vulgar? It proceeds, in my opinion, from that dissolution of dependence which obliges every man to regard his own character ... every man that crowds our streets is a man of honour, disdainful of obligation, impatient of reproach ... I do not deny that some inconveniences may from time to time proceed ... but good and evil will grow up in this world together; and they who complain, in peace, of the insolence of the populace, must remember, that their insolence in peace is bravery in war.

Remember the boys in Helmand next time you get angry about the brawl outside the pub.

In and around the life and work of Dr Johnson we find many of the things that the English have a right to be patriotic about: our language, our Shakespeare, our refusal to be bullied and bossed around, our sense of humour and sense of the ridiculous, our actors, our gift for biography, our robust opinions and our melancholy realism, our capacity to survive so long as we have a cup of tea.