Valet of the Dolls

Andrew O’Hagan

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There was only one other person in the life of Samuel Johnson who stood a chance of writing a biography as entertaining as Boswell’s. Francis Barber was overqualified by modern standards, and too loyal for the job in any era, but for more than thirty years he was Johnson’s (black) manservant. There in the small hours – peeling oranges, brewing tea, mending stockings, lifting papers – Barber was considered to be all the disciples other than Judas, though one now wonders, naturally, what the servant could have offered the great moralist in the way of a horrific posthumous disservice.

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[*] A Likely Story was written about in the LRB by Terry Castle (15 April 1999). The review appears in, and gives the title to, her latest book, Boss Ladies, Watch Out!: Essays on Women, Sex and Writing (Routledge, 309 pp., £55 and £15.99, October 2002, 0 415 93873 2).