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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... written.44 But in the life as lived, these episodes served the different function of drawing Johnson out. In the transition from experience to literature, they migrate from utility to ostentation. To draw Johnson out was also, one ...
... written down several texts of Scripture, recommending christian charity. And when I questioned him what occasion I ... writing: a mordant unmasking of unmeaning civility which nevertheless employs many of the literary tropes of ...
... writing and yet also refrains from any pretence that this transfer is or can be anything more than partial.155 As ... written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance ...
... written by the Author, for the sake of distinction has been enclosed within crotchets:6 in one instance, however, the printer by mistake has affixed this mark to a note relative to the Rev. Thomas Fysche Palmer, which was written by Mr ...
... written an angry Answer to the Review of his Essay on Tea, Johnson in the same Collection made a Reply to it. acknowl. This is the only Instance, it is believed, when he condescended to take Notice of any Thing that had been written ...