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Cooking Techniques Cookbooks Asian Chinese Cooking Cooking Culinary Arts & Techniques Holiday CookingThe case of Dr. Johnson is a strange one. On the one hand, the extent of his achievements, the magnetism of his personality, and the sheer strength of his genius has forever secured him a place among the literary giants of all ages. On the other hand, Time seems to have both granted him fame and deprived him of readers. Nowadays, when people want Dr. Johnson, they go straight to James Boswell. The man has sadly overshadowed...
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OK, I'll admit it... When I dropped out of high school at the tender age of 14 for a career of glue-sniffing and joy-riding round the graffiti-sprayed council estates of my native Irvine, I was a 'seven-stone weakling' in terms of using the English language. Brought up on a diet of comic books, tabloid newspapers, and football magazines (Shoot, Match Weekly, etc) and 'educated' in a Socialist-inspired 'comprehensive' school,...
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I read Johnson in the same way that I read Jane Austen, for the pure joy--and the celebration--of their beautifully balanced sentences. Indeed, it's almost like playing Bach to perform these sentences as they mount into paragraphs. One walks away feeling that one's thinking apparatus has been lovingly oiled, buffed, spun and polished. In addition, there's the incredible range of this man's thinking to applaud as well. However,...
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.It's a bit of a misnomer to call this anthology "The Major Works," because the principle guiding the original selection (under a different title) was to provide a diverse sampling of what he'd written -- and included items which would never be considered "major works" (such as a Latin school exercise and letters). They are worth reading, but not "major works." That having been said, as an *anthology* of Johnson's writings,...
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This is undeniably the best anthology of Johnson currently available. It outshines Penguin's much too abbreviated version and contains all the major items: a fine selection of the essays, several biographical pieces, including the essential Soame Jenyns and Life of Savage, the prefaces to the Dictionary and to Shakespeare, a selection of prayers, some wonderful letters, etc.For the journey to Scotland (only excertpted...
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