レビュー

• Wonderful biography!

• Beautifully written, erudite without being scholastic and poignant without being sentimental. If you're looking for the ideal introduction, this is highly recommended.

• There are a lot of biographies and critical books about Dr. Johnson, but Wain's, though not "scholarly", is the best for the common reader, in part because Wain, being a novelist, knows how to tell a story. Also worth looking up is Wain's volume of selections from Boswell's Diaries, which are too voluminous to be read entire. Surprisingly, Wain's novels are not very good. Even HURRY ON DOWN, his most successful, is so dated now as to be almost unreadable. Compare it with Kingsley Amis' LUCKY JIM, which is still a very good read, and you'll see what I mean. Would that more second-rate novelists would tackle literary criticism and biography. Angus Wilson is probably the best example of a minor novelist who wrote first-rate critical biographies (on Dickens and Kipling especially), but C.P. Snow is excellent on Trollope, as is V.S. Pritchett on Turgenev and Balzac.

• Quality

• Enjoyed the book very much

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