Few great historical figures have been so slandered and misrepresented as James Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, biographer of Samuel Johnson, fierce Corsican patriot and famous Highland traveller. Boswell moved between Edinburgh and London at the height of the Enlightenment, undertook one of the most eventful Grand Tours ever and who knew or met almost every significant figure of his time. In this biography, we meet Boswell with the reluctant Roussean and the malicious Voltaire in Switzerland, cultivating Samuel Johnson and becoming a lifelong friend of the great Corsican Pasquale Paoli. These figures, however, form only the foreground to a vast plethora of background characters - George III, John Wilkes, James Macpherson, David Garrick, Flora Macdonald, Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Horace Walpole, David Hume and, in the background, Boswell's own father, the Edinburgh judge Lord Auchinleck, reduced to despair by the antics and expenditure of his son. This biography aims to present a more rounded picture of Boswell as a man of his times and a symbol of the riot of intellectual and cultural energy which characterized the 18th century.
- ISBN10 1841582573
- ISBN13 9781841582573
- Publish Date September 2002 (first published 16 April 1995)
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Out of Print 24 August 2004
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Birlinn General
- Imprint Birlinn Ltd
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 240
- Language English