#jamesboswell — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #jamesboswell, aggregated by home.social.
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“In his excitement at the prospect of the examined life Boswell invented modern biography. He wrote like hell, and the full fragrance, the authentic buzz, of his own life and period, such as it was, rises with Flemish exactness from every other sentence he chose to write down.”
—Andrew O’Hagan’s celebration of James Boswell in the London Review of Books, 5 Oct 2000
5/5
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n19/andrew-o-hagan/self-hugging
#Scottish #literature #JamesBoswell #SamuelJohnson #18thCentury #biography
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“In his excitement at the prospect of the examined life Boswell invented modern biography. He wrote like hell, and the full fragrance, the authentic buzz, of his own life and period, such as it was, rises with Flemish exactness from every other sentence he chose to write down.”
—Andrew O’Hagan’s celebration of James Boswell in the London Review of Books, 5 Oct 2000
5/5
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n19/andrew-o-hagan/self-hugging
#Scottish #literature #JamesBoswell #SamuelJohnson #18thCentury #biography
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“A fool can utter a brilliant sentence but it seems quite rare for a fool to be able to write an admirable biography of seven or eight hundred pages”
Jorge Luis Borges asks, was Boswell just a lucky idiot? Or is his “Samuel Johnson” a brilliant literary creation?
4/5
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2013/07/28/lecture-johnson-and-boswell/
#Scottish #literature #JamesBoswell #SamuelJohnson #18thCentury #biography #Borges
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“While in Rome, Boswell posed for a painting […] Above him, an owl perched absurdly on a branch. Somehow the painter captured the mixture of silliness and self-importance that made Boswell so engaging.”
🖼️: George Willison (1741–1797), 1765
3/5
#Scottish #literature #JamesBoswell #SamuelJohnson #18thCentury #biography #art #visualart #portrait