James Boswell

In Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of English literature is revealed with unparalleled immediacy and originality, in a biography to which we owe much of our knowledge of the man himself. Through a series of richly detailed anecdotes, Johnson emerges as a sociable figure, vigorously engaging and fencing with great contemporaries such as Garrick, Goldsmith, Burney and Burke, and of course with Boswell himself. Yet anxieties...

The most famous friendship in English literature arose between a distinguished eighteenth-century writer and his young admirer. The result is this brilliant narrative and its enduring portrait of an age as well as person. James Boswell profiles critic, author, and poet Samuel Johnson, recapturing the sage's wit and conversational style on topics from literature and politics to religion and gossip. Much of their association was conducted from afar;...

Between the years of 1762 and 1763, James Boswell kept a journal of his time in London. During his time, he met the renowned writer, moralist, and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, with whom Boswell would form a close relationship. This account, told with much detail and candor, was one of the various journals written by Boswell, but it is the journal that has undergone the least amount of censorship, leading it, and the racy material within, to be deemed...

In 1773, an unlikely pair-a dominant figure of English literature and a young lawyer-set out on horseback to follow roads and cattle-trails across the Highlands to the Western Islands of Scotland. Their conversation and accounts are filled with curious detail, flashing wit and fascinating encounters with the high and low of the country.

Samuel Johnson and James Boswell spent the autumn of 1773 touring through the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland as far west as the islands of Skye, Raasay, Coll, Mull, Inchkenneth and Iona. Both kept detailed notes of their impressions, and later published separate accounts of their journey. These works contain some of the finest pieces of travel writing ever produced: they are also magnificent historical documents as well as portraits of two extraordinary...