Paul Johnson
Scribble, Scribble
Boswell’s Life of Johnson is the greatest biography in the language, indeed in any language. But not all the Doctor is there – Boswell dealt mainly with the later part of the life, when he knew Johnson and recorded his conversation. It is a book of character and sayings. But there is more to the man than that. Indeed Johnson’s life and works are so rich that many scholars and writers have been tempted to feast on it. I am thinking particularly of James Clifford, so good on the early years and the Dictionary period, and Walter Jackson Bate, whose one-volume Samuel Johnson takes some beating.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings