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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... kind of difference between the two men, namely their occasional bouts of coolness or sullenness.45 The Life records a number of interruptions in their friendship: for instance, in 1764 and 1765 (when Boswell records that Johnson 'did ...
... kind of writing completely purged of unevenness. The Life proclaims and seeks out unevenness, whether it be the inclusion of un-Boswellian material, or the different kind of unevenness which resulted from Boswell's less than perfect ...
... kind approbation. Dr. Adams, eminent as the Head of a College, as a writer, and as a most amiable man, had known Johnson from his early years, and was his friend through life. What reason I had to hope for the countenance of that ...
... then, forsake the unfinished war? How would. from the Sixth Book of HOMER'S ILIAD. She ceas'd: then godlike Hector answer'd kind, (His various plumage sporting in the wind) That post, and all the rest, shall be my care;
... kind, More false, more cruel, than the seas or wind. 'Toil on, dull croud, in extacies he cries, For wealth or title, perishable prize; While I those transitory blessings scorn, Secure of praise from ages yet unborn.' This thought once ...