Life of JohnsonJames Boswell
Life of Johnson
12mentions
4recommended by
11HN commenters
2009–2022first – last mentioned
36% recommend64% neutral
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…Creator: Isaac Newton & his Times Newton Opticks Newton Principia (get the modern English translation by U.C. Press) Hampson The Enlightenment Voltaire Candide Rousseau The Social Contract Boswell Life of Johnson Goethe Faust Phillips The Cousins' Wars Schom Napoleon Bonaparte Heidler & Heidler Old Hickory's War Babbage On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures de Toqueville Democracy in America Darwin…
on “PG's Rarely Asked Questions” ↗18th Century. It's completely readable, as are many other works written at the same time, such as Boswell's Life of Johnson. As for the 16th (and early 17th) century - Shakespeare?
on “What Snoop Dogg’s Success Says About the Book Industry” ↗Boswell's Life of Johnson. I have an old OUP hardback in Scotch Roman that is an old-fashioned experience in itself.
on “Ask HN: Books for reading before bed?” ↗…define this as "10 books that I'd recommend to my 40-years-younger self to prioritize", and leave aside the problem that 2 or 3 of these would not yet have been published. The Iliad Shakespeare The Life of Johnson Federalist Papers Pride and Prejudice Ulysses The Waste Land The Selfish Gene The Making of the Atomic Bomb Infinite Jest
on “What does it mean for a journalist today to be a Serious Reader?” ↗One thing that struck me when I read Boswell’s Life of Johnson more than twenty years ago is how strange Johnson seems to have been in person yet how strongly he was admired and loved—at least in Boswell’s telling—by people who knew him. Boswell mentions his “oddities…
on “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” ↗From Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, entry for April 19, 1773 (Courtesy of gutenberg.org): Mr. Elphinston talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. JOHNSON. 'I have looked into it.' 'What (said Elphinston,)…
on “When to Stop Reading a Book” ↗…which he was so remarkable, he [...] retorted, 'That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.'" Had Boswell been more thin-skinned or less stubborn, we might have had no Life of Johnson, and so no Johnson either.
on “Tech Job Scotland” ↗I've heard that theory before, but I've not seen any evidence for it, and it seems directly contradicted by this quote from Boswell's "Life of Johnson" (early 1700s): "He related to me the following minute anecdote of this period: 'In the last age, when my mother lived in London, there were two sets of people, those who gave the wall, and those who…
on “Why do some countries drive on the left and others on the right?” ↗…policy; only in dramatic cases does it become causal. Appealing to public opinion to predict that the status quo will persist is therefore a historical fallacy. There's an example of this in Boswell's Life of Johnson. Here is Johnson, the great English Tory, arguing in 1769 that general warrants are a non-issue because the public doesn't care: [Johnson] would not admit the importance of the question concerning the…
on “The Drone Papers” ↗From Boswell's Life of Johnson, entry for April 19, 1773: Mr. Elphinston talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. JOHNSON. 'I have looked into it.' 'What, (said Elphinston,) have you not…
on “How Could You Like That Book?” ↗…accompanying the definitions, which Johnson culled and compiled by his lonesome. He quoted Macrobius in his interview for prep school as a young child, ensuring him a spot. We learn this from Boswell's Life of Johnson, one of the first sources in English of extensive transcriptions of direct speech. I had a wonderful, now gone, Modern European History teacher in high school, Mr Kurtz, who wrote and performed a one…
on “Today's Google Doodle Celebrates Samuel Johnson's 308th Birthday” ↗Somewhere in Boswell's Life of Johnson he quotes Johnson as asking, in reference to the American colonies, "Why do we always here the loudest cries for liberty from the drivers of slaves?"
on “Girls Who Code under fire for working with arms dealer Raytheon” ↗