Best remembered today as friend and biographer of Dr Samuel Johnson, Boswell was an extraordinary figure of eighteenth-century society. Vain yet good-natured, foolish yet charming, he was also conceited and a hypochondriac with a drinking problem. He forced himself upon eminent people, and bragged about the great men he knew. David Hume thought him a bit crazy. Yet for years Boswell moved in the same circles as Sheridan, Goldsmith, Rousseau, Voltaire and Walpole. And he …showed first 75 words of 299 total…

…showed last 75 words of 299 total…in James's Court, Lawnmarket, in 1773 when the great man arrived in Edinburgh to begin their famous journey to the Hebrides. Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides was not published until 1786, a year after Johnson's death. His Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, was an immediate success. A perceptive observer blessed with a retentive memory, Boswell's narrative has dramatic power. These gifts and his industry have given us an incomparable picture of his times.