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
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... Look, my Lord, it comes.'I found that I had a very perfect idea of Johnson's figure, from the portrait of him painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds soon after he had published his Dictionary, in the attitude of sitting in his easy chair in ...
... Look, my Lord, it comes”' – which is the pivotal element in the transformation of the original impression into the eventual work of literary art. The encounter between Hamlet and his father's ghost is the event which determines the ...
... look, and in a solemn but quiet tone, 'That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL.'24 A tendency to self-torment was a characteristic the two men shared.25 In his journal, Boswell admonished himself to ...
... look' – the moth's name might with equal propriety have been Johnson. To escape from the self by contemplating an image of the self may seem paradoxical. Nevertheless, it may be psychologically plausible, and furthermore it resonates ...
... look at it, I pronounce him to be mad.' It is a common effect of low spirits or melancholy, to make those who are afflicted with it imagine that they are actually suffering those evils which happen to be most strongly presented to their ...