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. |
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... hand hold yours'): a gesture which is saturated with a sense of strong yet delicate friendship.37 And it was Langton who informed Boswell of the strength of Johnson's feeling for Topham Beauclerk: 'His affection for Topham Beauclerk was ...
... hand to Johnson in Scotland a month or so later. It is nevertheless striking that the name of Boswell does not arise. The first public announcement of the Life is easier to pin down. At the end of his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides ...
... hands to be reposited in my archives at Auchinleck. An honourable and reverend friend5 speaking of the favourable ... hand-writing, an inscription of such high commendation, that even I, vain as I am, cannot prevail on myself to ...
... hand crows, from an old hollow oak, Foretold the coming evil by their dismal croak. Translation. of. HORACE. Book. I. Ode. xxii. The man, my friend, whose conscious heart With virtue's sacred ardour glows, Nor taints with death the envenom ...
... hand from Taylor, till his poverty being so extreme that his shoes were worn out, and his feet appeared through them, he saw that this humiliating circumstance was perceived by the Christ Church men, and he came no more. He was too ...