Peter Martin 
A Life of James Boswell.
Yale University Press, 613 pages $35

Adam Sisman 
Boswell’s Presumptuous Task.
Hamish Hamilton, 392 pages, £17.99.

reviewed by John Derbyshire

Published in 1791, the Life of Samuel Johnson became famous at once, but left everyone baffled that such a tremendous masterpiece could have been produced by James Boswell. The biographer was regarded by those who knew him as a talentless buffoon and by many others as something even less. Macaulay, most famously, pronounced Boswell “one of the smallest men who ever lived . . . a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect . . . servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot . . . a common butt in the taverns of London.” Does not a work of genius require a genius for its production?

The mystery endured for half-a-century, until...

 

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