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“... or being pursued by Lords Cholmondeley, Coleraine and others, before she settled down with Charles James Fox. Though many, perhaps most, of the women travellers were eminently respectable, being accompanied by husbands or fathers (like Horace Walpole’s darling Mary and Agnes Berry), a surprising number went on their own. The amorous affairs of the young ...”

“... formidable wit and independence. One of the more durable of the ‘épouseurs’ was the young James Boswell, who on first meeting her composed some doggerel beginning: And yet just now a Utrecht lady’s charms Make my gay bosom beat with love’s alarms. Who could have thought to see young Cupid fly Through Belgia’s thick and suffocating ...”

“... about this undoubtedly American poet. He is the justified sinner whom we meet in the fiction of James Hogg. And he is the superman, the Stavrogin, whom we meet in the fiction of Dostoevsky: the antinomian hero bent both on power and mischief and on the blessedness of the meek, so that he’s Prince Myshkin too, and it’s hardly surprising that he should ...”

“... of a fashionable metropolis. Pleasure gardens were real places, visited by Fanny Burney and James Boswell as well as by characters in novels. They were also places of the imagination, whether that imagination was appalled or enraptured. They were the inventions of a society of conspicuous consumption (‘luxury’ in the old parlance) and ...”

“... Byrne is depicted in Rowlandson’s sketch, made into a print, of the Surprising Irish Giant at St James’s Street. Mantel makes grim comedy out of the pressures on the Giant and his companions from all the other prodigies clamouring for the public’s attention in Georgian London. Rowlandson depicted The Wonderful Learned Pig performing in the room where one ...”

“... as much as it does the world of Capote. And that is one of the book’s strengths: Plimpton, like James Boswell, is an enthusiast for the world he is conjuring; he knows it well, knows all the figures in the carpet; the people are for the most part his acquaintances too, and his way of arranging their words is bent by his own understanding of how it all ...”

“... Dissidence, have caused scarcely a ripple outside the literary critical lagoon, but when John Boswell, a rather old-fashioned medieval historian, claimed to have discovered evidence for gay marriages being celebrated and blessed inside Christian churches, he made waves. It is not altogether obvious why the suggestion should be so shocking. Why is it ...”

“... less celebrated, than those with which William Henry Ireland in the previous century had deceived James Boswell and many others, though not the great Shakespearean Edmond Malone (himself guilty of tampering with manuscripts). The men of this new age were scholars, working in a tradition often said to have originated with Malone and achieving, in the 20th ...”

“... by the governor of the principality: Lord Keith, a Jacobite exile and friend of David Hume and James Boswell. Rousseau could hardly have been more fortunate in his protector. For Keith was no longer a fiery Catholic enthusiast for lost causes but a good-natured sceptic, who enjoyed Rousseau’s company, and was not unduly put out by his suspicious and ...”

“... in Latin writing did not always reflect superb teaching in schools and universities. When James Boswell showed Samuel Johnson his Latin thesis, the doctor shook his head at the many solecisms and remarked: ‘Ruddiman is dead, sir, Ruddiman is dead.’ He knew that the high quality of the Latin dissertations previously submitted to the Society of ...”

“... When Samuel Johnson, travelling in the Highlands with James Boswell, reaches Loch Ness, he is so overwhelmed by the massiveness of the landscape that the heavy order of his prose is briefly disarrayed. On his right, there are high and steep rocks, and on his left deep water laps against the bank in ‘gentle agitation ...”

“... a word. Mencken confuses Samuel Johnson the writer with Dr Johnson the ogre and bully portrayed by Boswell. James Murray, the author of the OED, succumbed to the same confusion, perhaps, when in a dream he imagined that Johnson was speaking of his Dictionary and Boswell, in an impish ...”

“... he called it ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind’? Even before the age of Romantic introspection, James Boswell, crushed by an oppressive father, was much concerned about who he might be, as he stood before the mirror admonishing himself ‘Be Johnson!’ or ‘Be Paoli!’ Hume had a look for his ID, and serenely found nothing there. And half a century ...”

“... them on Berlin’s Leipzigerstrasse, who used to occupy their own grand residence, and even what James Boswell thought of that previous owner. It is daunting to consider the labour that must have gone into this volume, the archives accessed, scores scrutinised, facts double-checked – and hard, when reading it, not to. The book takes account of, and ...”

“... How can we know Samuel Johnson without summoning him through the reanimating power of James Boswell’s Life? For the many scholars, writers, readers and collectors who call themselves Johnsonians, this is the near impossible task. Boswell first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It ...”