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
Results 1-5 of 74
... once the fuller and more ceremonious form the episode takes in the Life; next, perhaps, the softening of Boswell's original sense of Johnson's disagreeableness into the milder emotion of nonplussed embarrassment. But it is the ...
... once again to reap the emotional and intellectual benefits which, for him, flowed from intellectual collision. To feel a strong and strengthening flow of opinion may be to feel both stronger and simpler than, in reality, you are ...
... once pleasing and painful. Of this truth, the progress of the present Work furnishes a striking instance. It was highly gratifying to me that my friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom it is inscribed, lived to peruse it, and to give the ...
... once himself of his being much distinguished at school, he told me, 'they never thought to raise me by comparing me to any one; they never said, Johnson is as good a scholar as such a one; but such a one is as good a scholar as Johnson ...
... once form'd, all counsel comes too late, He flies to press, and hurries on his fate; Swiftly he sees the imagin'd laurels spread, And feels the unfading wreath surround his head. Warn'd by another's fate, vain youth be wise, Those ...