The Life of Samuel JohnsonPenguin UK, 2008 M10 30 - 1312 pages In Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of English literature is revealed with unparalleled immediacy and originality. While Johnson’s Dictionary remains a monument of scholarship, and his essays and criticism command continuing respect, we owe our knowledge of the man himself to this biography. Through a series of wonderfully detailed anecdotes, Johnson emerges as a sociable figure with a huge appetite for life, crossing swords with other great eighteenth-century luminaries, from Garrick and Goldsmith to Burney and Burke – even his long-suffering friend and disciple James Boswell. Yet Johnson had a vulnerable, even tragic, side and anxieties and obsessions haunted his private hours. Boswell’s sensitivity and insight into every facet of his subject’s character ultimately make this biography as moving as it is entertaining. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 89
... doubt great allowance must be made for the extremity of the moment. Nevertheless, we are here far from any Montaignean extolling of 'amitié',23 and Johnson's awareness of the complexity and possible impurity of the motives to friendship ...
... doubt that this club 'would be very bad with respect to the State'.108 There is a similar weighing of contrary benefits and evils evident in Johnson's conversation in 1783 with General Oglethorpe about the Glorious Revolution ...
... doubt, replied I, and he will do it the best among us. 'The dog would write it best to be sure, replied he; but his particular malice towards me, and general disregard for truth, would make the book useless to all, and injurious to my ...
... doubts I at any time entertained, have been entirely removed by the very favourable reception with which it has been honoured. That reception has excited my best ... doubt, if his discourse at other periods had been collected with the same.
... doubt of the truth of this anecdote, for she had heard it from his mother. So difficult is it to obtain an authentick relation of facts, and such authority may there be for errour; for he assured me, that his father made the verses, and ...