The Life of Samuel JohnsonPenguin UK, 30.10.2008 - 1312 Seiten 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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... character as labile as that of Boswell, it was (as we have seen) hard always to keep the feigned clearly separated from the felt, and the felt could easily have led to rupture, as it nearly did in 1778, in consequence of a dinner party ...
... character which could also take less sombre forms. A melancholy Johnson, wandering through Paris in the company of the brewer Henry Thrale and his vivacious wife, and suddenly mindful of the absence of his own, dead, wife (who would he ...
... I have been undoubtedly informed, that many persons, especially in distant quarters, not penetrating enough into Johnson's character, so as to understand his mode of treating his friends, have arraigned my judgement,
... character; and as I have spared no pains in obtaining materials concerning him, from every quarter: where I could discover that they were to be found, and have been favoured with the most liberal communications by his friends; I flatter ...
... characters adorned with uniform panegyrick, and not to be known from one another but by extrinsick and casual circumstances ... character, is, I trust, too well established in the judgment of mankind, to be at all shaken by a sneering ...