A Life of James Boswell

This moving biography reassesses James Boswell's achievements and uncovers the breadth of his world, extending from the royal courts and drawing rooms of London to the city's unsavory underworld. Peter Martin dispels the notion that Boswell's masterly Life of Johnson was an accidental work of genius, and shows that Boswell was a writer of the highest order and a complex, troubled, but ultimately appealing man.