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 and obsessions also darkened Johnson's private hours, and Boswell's attentiveness to every facet of Johnson's character makes this...

When James Boswell persuaded Samuel Johnson to embark on a tour of Boswell's native Scotland in 1773, the adventure resulted in two magnificent books, Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. This title offfers a portrait how these two men explored the feudal world.

This complete and unabridged edition is the only complete critical edition in paperback. Samuel Johnson was a poet, essayist, dramatist, and pioneering lexicographer, but his continuing reputation depends less on his literary output than on the fortunate accident of finding an ideal biographer in James Boswell. As Johnson's constant and admiring companion, Boswell was able to record not only the outward events of his life, but also the humour, wit, and sturdy common sense of his conversation. His brilliant portrait of a major literary figure of the eighteenth century, enriched by historical...

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. Here, they paint a picture of a society which was still almost unknown to the Europe of the Enlightenment.

A group portrait of a brilliant circle, at the centre of which Boswell captures the powerful, troubled and witty figure of Samuel Johnson. The book is also an intimate picture of domestic life, which mingles the greatest talkers of a talkative age with the hero's humbler friends.

Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides form a natural pair for an OWC because both books, often read and taught alongside each other, focus on the Scottish highlands.