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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... lady's part.'7 It would be hard to find a more concentrated example of Boswell's performative idea of character, so perfectly parallel are its reflecting planes of performance and reception. Into this strange world of dissoluteness ...
... LADY. on. her. BIRTH-DAY.a. This tributary verse receive my fair, Warm with an ardent lover's fondest pray'r. May this returning day for ever find Thy form more lovely, more adorn'd thy mind; All pains, all cares, may favouring heav'n ...
... lady, who, in a paper with which I have been favoured by a daughter of his intimate friend and physician, Dr. Lawrence, thus describes Dr. Johnson some years afterwards: 'As the particulars of the former part of Dr. Johnson's life do ...
... lady and her relations, because her alledged unnatural and cruel conduct to her son, and shameful avowal of guilt ... lady's family, I have received such information and remarks, as joined to my own inquiries, will, I think, render it at ...
... Lady Macclesfield having lived for some time upon very uneasy terms with her husband, thought a publick confession of adultery the most obvious and expeditious method of obtaining her liberty;' and Johnson, assuming this to be true ...