James Boswell

James Boswell wrote the greatest biography in English by following a man around and writing down what he said that night. He was the son of a Scottish judge, studied law to please his father, and wanted to be anything else - soldier, aristocrat, man of letters. He met Samuel Johnson in a bookshop in 1763, at twenty-two, and was rebuked at once for being a Scot; they knew each other for twenty-one years, though Boswell was in London for only a few months of most of them. He made a Grand Tour on which he talked his way in to see Rousseau and Voltaire, and then attached himself to the Corsican independence leader Pasquale Paoli, publishing An Account of Corsica in 1768 - which made him famous across Europe as Corsica Boswell long before Johnson did. He persuaded Johnson, at sixty-three and afraid of water, to tour the Hebrides with him in 1773. The Life of Samuel Johnson appeared in 1791 and works because of the method: he recorded conversation in shorthand notes the same evening, engineered meetings between people to see what would happen, and left in his own foolishness alongside the great man's talk. His life was less orderly than the book. He drank heavily, kept obsessive journals of his gambling and his prostitutes, contracted gonorrhoea at least seventeen times, and failed at the English bar. The private papers were thought destroyed and turned up in the twentieth century in a croquet box in Ireland and a stable loft at Malahide. Their publication made him a major writer in his own right, and not only Johnson's recorder.

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