Download or read book A Life of James Boswell written by Peter Martin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-30 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Born in Edinburgh, the 'Athens of the North', a Scot who hated living in Scotland and nourished a lifelong love affair with London, Boswell was biographer, journalist, laird, advocate, social lion, incurable rake, lover, life of the party, traveller, steadfast friend, endearing charmer, exhibitionist fool, and drunken sot. In this moving biography, Peter Martin assesses Boswell's literary achievements and uncovers the pulsating and dynamic world he thrived in, from the royal courts and the drawing rooms of fashionable ladies and gentlemen to the fleshpots of London's unsavoury underworld and the chambers of the insane. He also poignantly reveals a man in agony, easily misunderstood, relentlessly plagued by hypochondria or melancholia, buffeted like a straw in the wind by a multitude of anxieties and 'horrible imaginings'."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book Boswell s Presumptuous Task written by Adam Sisman and published by HarperPerennial. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With great wit, Sisman here tells the story of Boswell's presumptuous task--the making of the greatest biography of all time. Sisman traces the friendship between Boswell and Samuel Johnson, his mentor, and provides a fascinating account of Boswell's seven-year struggle to write "The Life of Samuel Johnson."

Download or read book Samuel Johnson written by David Nokes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking portrait of Samuel Johnson, Nokes positions the great thinker in his rightful place as an active force in the Enlightenment, not a mere recorder or performer, and demonstrates how his interaction with life impacted his work.

Download or read book The Club written by Leo Damrosch and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prize-winning biographer Leo Damrosch tells the story of “the Club,” a group of extraordinary writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavern In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.” In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. 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. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.

Download or read book London Journal 1762 1763 written by James Boswell and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-06-04 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edinburgh-born James Boswell, at twenty-two, kept a daily diary of his eventful second stay in London from 1762 to 1763. This journal, not discovered for more than 150 years, is a deft, frank and artful record of adventures ranging from his vividly recounted love affair with a Covent Garden actress to his first amusingly bruising meeting with Samuel Johnson, to whom Boswell would later become both friend and biographer. The London Journal 1762-63 is a witty, incisive and compellingly candid testament to Boswell's prolific talents.

Download or read book Daily Life in Johnson s London written by Richard B. Schwartz and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A rich, fascinating, enlightening if sometimes slightly terrifying tableau of real life in one of the world's most celebrated cities."--Los Angeles Times

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson written by Greg Clingham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-10-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion, first published in 1997, provides an introduction to the works and life of one of the key figures in English literary history.

Download or read book Capital of the Mind written by James Buchan and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “elegant portrait of Edinburgh in the age of Enlightenment” reveals a thriving city of artists, architects, scientists, and other pioneers (Times Literary Supplement). In the early eighteenth century, Edinburgh, Scotland, was a filthy backwater town synonymous with poverty and disease. Yet by century’s end, it had become the marvel of modern Europe, home to the finest minds of the day and their breathtaking innovations in architecture, politics, science, the arts, and economics—all of which continues to echo loudly today. Adam Smith penned The Wealth of Nations. James Boswell produced The Life of Samuel Johnson. Alongside them, pioneers such as David Hume, Robert Burns, James Hutton, and Sir Walter Scott transformed the way we understand our perceptions and feelings, sickness and health, relations between the sexes, the natural world, and the purpose of existence. In Capital of the Mind, James Buchan beautifully reconstructs the intimate geographic scale and boundless intellectual milieu of Enlightenment Edinburgh. With the scholarship of a historian and the elegance of a novelist, he tells the story of the triumph of this unlikely town and those whose vision brought it into being. “As Buchan says in this marvelous book, ‘there is no city like Edinburgh in all the world’.” —Sunday Times

Download or read book The Lives of the English Poets written by and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Boswell s Life of Johnson written by James Boswell and published by London : MacMillan and Company. This book was released on 1922 with total page 1404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Defining the World written by Henry Hitchings and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliantly entertaining and enlightening, this volume tells the story of Samuel Johnson's endeavor to create an authoritative English dictionary. Hitchings describes Johnson's adventure--his ambition and vision, his moments of despair, the mistakes he made along the way, and his ultimate triumph.

Download or read book The Life of Samuel Johnson written by James Boswell and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-02-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is often called the greatest biography of all-time and may well be. Perhaps such a work can get no higher praise, but it is also highly notable as the first true modern biography - the first really resembling what we think of as biography today. Boswell set new standards for thoroughness, accuracy, and research, greatly expanding the very concept of what a biography could be. He was also very far ahead of his time in anticipating what was later called gonzo journalism - writers inserting themselves into real-life stories; it is of course not done in the same way as later writers, but the concept is similar. Most remarkable of all, though, is that the book is immensely readable, entertaining, and edifying over two hundred years later, which can be said of very few biographies. It is absolutely essential for anyone even remotely interested in Johnson, Boswell, or the late eighteenth century European intellectual circle. Johnson was perhaps England's best known writer during his last several decades and one of the most famous in the world besides being widely known and renowned for lexicographical and other accomplishments. However, this book's greatness and fame are such that he has long been known primarily via it. Many read it who have read very little or none of him, showing that, unlike nearly all biographies, it has earned a life of its own. There are many reasons for this, not least the fine writing. Even more fundamental is that the book vividly brings an exciting, integral, and profoundly influential era to life. It covers the late Enlightenment when many of the most important people to ever live were prominent. In addition to Johnson, we get first-hand glimpses of such illustrious personages as Adam Smith, Oliver Goldsmith, Pasquale Paoli, David Garrick, and many, many others. Numerous other heavyweights - Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, King George III, etc. - are only slightly in the background. We also get contemporaneous accounts of major events like the American Revolution and the lead up to the French Revolution. In short, though ostensibly the biography of one person, the book is as vibrant, lifelike, and memorable an account of a supremely important era as any history book. Yet Johnson is always the focus, shown literally from birth to death. Anyone interested in him will find a wealth of information about all aspects of his life as well as his thoughts, feelings, influences, intellectual background, and far more. There is also a great deal of information about his work. Unlike nearly all biographers, Boswell actually knew Johnson well; he was his friend for many years and spent several months annually in his company, essentially interviewing him and making voluminous notes of his conversation. This last is indeed the book's heart and by far its most famous element. Johnson was perhaps his era's most famous conversationalist, revered for wit and argument; Boswell heard many hours of his conversation and reports faithfully. His style here was again innovative. Rather than sprinkling isolated quotes anecdotally, he went to great pains to reproduce full conversations, not only describing the setting and others present but even using drama-like name headings for full verisimilitude. We thus not only see what Johnson said but where, how, and usually why he said it.

Download or read book Boswell s Life of Johnson Life written by James Boswell and published by . This book was released on 1887 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The lives of the most eminent English poets with critical observations on their works written by Samuel Johnson and published by . This book was released on 1819 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Boswell s Life of Johnson Volume 2 of 3 EasyRead Super Large 18pt Edition written by James Boswell and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 1969 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Boswell s Life of Johnson ed by A Birrell written by James Boswell and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Boswell s Life of Johnson written by and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: