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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... tell me, had she not tit for tat? I gave three huzzas, and we went briskly in.1 'Cato's soliloquy' is, of course, the famous speech from the coda to Joseph Addison's immensely popular play in which, on the point of being defeated by ...
... tell him.'131 Boswell may have taken the decision to write the Life of Johnson soon after meeting his subject, but the earliest evidence from within the Life itself that Johnson was aware of Boswell's design comes from March 1772, in a ...
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