James Boswell

James Boswell was a Scottish laird’s son who came to London at twenty-two, kept the London Journal of his adventures, met Johnson in a bookshop the next year, and made recording him his life’s work. The Life of Samuel Johnson of 1791, built from twenty years of notes, is the first modern biography and the greatest in English, preserving Johnson’s conversation as no one else’s has been preserved. Boswell was a lawyer, a drunk, a chaser of women and a man of touching honesty about all three, and the journals found at Malahide Castle in the twentieth century made him a subject in his own right.