Let us breakfast in splendour
Charles Nicholl: Francis Barber, 16 July 2015
The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir
by Michael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015,978 0 300 20710 1 Show More
by Michael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015,
“... as is attested by the publisher of it. It is also often stated that Barber was a writer. In Robert Winder’s book about immigrants, Bloody Foreigners, he is further puffed as the ‘poet and protégé’ of Johnson, and so another half-baked factoid is fed into the misinformation factory. One is grateful to Bundock for his calm and careful sifting of ... ”