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Boswell reveals Samuel Johnson as one of the towering figures of English literature with unparalleled immediacy and originality. While Johnson's ‘Dictionary’ remains a monument of scholarship, we owe our knowledge of the man to this biography.
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Dr Johnson was a dazzling conversationalist, a polymath and a moralist. He was also a deeply melancholy man, haunted by dark thoughts. Johnson's story touches on many themes that have enduring significance.
Liza Picard examines every aspect of life in London during part of the eighteenth century: the streets, houses, gardens, cooking, housework, shopping, clothes, medicine, sex, hobbies, education, etiquette, religion, popular beliefs, law, and crime.
Christopher Hibbert draws on every known contemporary source to provide a minutely detailed look at the fascinating writer Samuel Johnson.
Fopdoodle, salmagundi, kissingcrust, runnion and stingo are all endangered for lack of use. This work reveals entries in Dr Johnson's dictionary that show how meanings have changed, words have slipped out of use and attitudes have been transformed.
Johnson became the most admired and quoted man in the eighteenth century. David Nokes looks at Johnson’s troubled relationship with his first wife, at his family, and at his difficult, intimate relationship with Mrs Thrale.
Popular readings of Johnson often see him as a writer who both laments and attempts to control the state of the language. Lynda Mugglestone looks at the range of Johnson's writings and the complexity of his thinking about language and lexicography.
Johnson is often thought of as a man who famously asserted that 'Women have all the liberty they should wish to have'. Kate Chisholm proposes that the truth of his character can be seen via his close, generous, equal - relationships with women.
A description of the friendship between the young Samuel Johnson and the poet, playwright and convicted murderer, Richard Savage, by award-winning biographer Richard Holmes.
This work concentrates on the years after Johnson's death, during which Boswell, through all his trials and sorrows, remained dedicated to the task of depicting his friend "more completely than any man who has yet ever lived".
With the friendship of the "odd couple" Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth-century Britain.
In 1762 James Boswell, then twenty-two years old, left Edinburgh for London. The famous Journal he kept during the next nine months is an intimate account of his encounters with the high-life and the low-life in London.
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