Boswell's Edinburgh Journals
Boswell's Edinburgh Journals

Author: Hugh Milne

Publisher: Birlinn

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 726

ISBN-13: 0857905864

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

James Boswell's relish for life, unflinching honesty and wide social contacts make him one of the raciest and most entertaining of all diarists.This is a one-volume edition of the journals he kept while making his living as an advocate in eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Hugh Milne's introduction and notes remove the barriers that time has placed between us and Boswell. The result is a book in which an extraordinary personality lives before us upon the page. Boswell embodied in himself all the extremes and contradictions of his time and place. This was the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment, and among his friends he counted thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith, and entertained eminent visitors like Dr Johnson. Boswell was alive to every new social or political idea and was interested in all the drama of human life, whether high or low. All Boswell's public and private doings, and his inner debates about religion and the meaning of life, go unedited into his journal. His vivid description of a whole gallery of characters and situations makes its pages compulsively readable.

London Journal 1762-1763
London Journal 1762-1763

Author: James Boswell

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2015-06-04

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13: 0241215455

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Edinburgh-born James Boswell, at twenty-two, kept a daily diary of his eventful second stay in London from 1762 to 1763. This journal, not discovered for more than 150 years, is a deft, frank and artful record of adventures ranging from his vividly recounted love affair with a Covent Garden actress to his first amusingly bruising meeting with Samuel Johnson, to whom Boswell would later become both friend and biographer. The London Journal 1762-63 is a witty, incisive and compellingly candid testament to Boswell's prolific talents.

To The Hebrides
To The Hebrides

Author: Samuel Johnson

Publisher: Birlinn

Published: 2012-09-28

Total Pages: 609

ISBN-13: 0857905163

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and James Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides are widely regarded as among the best pieces of travel writing ever produced. Johnson and Boswell spent the autumn of 1773 touring Scotland as far west as the islands of Skye, Raasay, Coll, Mull, Ulva, Inchkenneth and Iona. Highly readable, often profound, and at times very funny, their accounts of the 'jaunt' are above all a valuable record of a society undergoing rapid change. In this pioneering new edition, Ronald Black brings together the two men's starkly contrasting accounts of each of the thirteen stages of the journey. He also restores to Boswell's text 20,000 words from his journal which were denied entry to his book because they were intimate, defamatory, or about the islands rather than Johnson. The endnotes incorporate Boswell's footnotes, translations of Latin passages, a clear summary of pre-existing information on the two texts, and a fresh focus on what the two men actually found on their trip. To the Hebrides also includes contemporary prints by Thomas Rowlandson, seventeen new maps and a comprehensive index.

The Duel between Sir Alexander Boswell and James Stuart
The Duel between Sir Alexander Boswell and James Stuart

Author: Michael Moss

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1527537439

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sir Alexander Boswell (1775-1822) wrote Scottish songs that are still performed today, such as “Jenny’s Bawbee”. An extravagant character and a Tory, he wrote flagrant lampoons of his Whig opponents. One of them greatly incensed his Whig cousin James Stuart of Dunearn, who challenged him to a duel in which Boswell was killed. At his trial for murder, Stuart was represented as a peaceable man unaccustomed to the use of firearms. Nothing could be further from the truth. He served in the militia, was irascible and, at times, violent. This book tells the compelling stories of the remarkable tangled events that led to their quarrel. The duel marked a turning point in Scottish politics away from a turbulent and fractious past to a quieter future. The Whigs triumphed, paving the way for liberal Scotland. In addition, this volume includes, for the first time, many of Boswell’s poems and witty lampoons.