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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... mind. Johnson 'often expressed the feelings and uncertainties of his mind' to Brocklesby, so this is no superficial or cursory opinion: He had the most logical apprehensive, and book informed vigorous Mind, that I have ever known, but ...
... mind with mind', was a matter not just of confirming the vigour of the initial impulse from Johnson.65 For it was also through such emphatic encounters that the self came to know and to enjoy both itself and the external world – this ...
... mind presents it to us as the site of unremitting struggle: His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisæum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the ...
... mind long before he wrote.'86 Johnson's vehement rejection of Hume is thus to some extent the child of their proximity: 'He would not allow Mr. David Hume any credit for his political principles, though similar to his own; saying of him ...
... mind, and pleased with an undisguised display of what had passed in it, he called to me with warmth, 'Give me your hand; I have taken a liking to you.'123 What Johnson warms to in Boswell is the shadow of his own religious misgivings ...