Strutting

Linda Colley

  • All the Sweets of Being: The Life of James Boswell by Roger Hutchinson
    Mainstream, 238 pp, £17.50, May 1995, ISBN 1 85158 702 0
  • James Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ edited by Marshall Waingrow
    Edinburgh, 518 pp, £75.00, March 1995, ISBN 0 7486 0471 5
  • Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia by Pat Rogers
    Oxford, 245 pp, £30.00, April 1995, ISBN 0 19 818259 7

There is a sinister painting by the 18th-century artist Francis Hayman of a couple frolicking on a seesaw. A youth soars triumphantly into the air, but his hold seems precarious. His female companion descends smilingly to the ground, only to tumble back into the lascivious arms of another man. Altogether an appropriately ambivalent emblem, one might think, for the vicissitudes that James Boswell would experience throughout his life, and the turbulence of his reputation since his death.

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