Samuel Johnson: A Biography - Tapa blanda

The story is well told, quotations from Boswell and Johnson are frequent and judicious, the anecdotes (familiar to some) are enlivening, and a picture of the fierce, complicated, manically eccentric genius emerges that will provoke admiration and wonder.--Rex Murphy"Globe and Mail" (02/21/2009)

A fetching new version of the life of Samuel Johnson.--Julia Keller"Chicago Tribune" (10/19/2008)

[An] outstanding new biography.--Christopher Hitchens"The Atlantic" (03/01/2009)

Meticulously researched and well written.--James Srodes"Washington Times" (01/25/2009)

Peter Martin's biography of Samuel Johnson is a profoundly poignant and eloquent account of the Western world's greatest literary critic. It is superior even to Martin's valuable biography of Boswell.--Harold Bloom

As Johnson's three hundredth birthday approaches, the time is ripe for a new biography that takes into account all we have learned about Johnson in this century and the later years of the last. Martin knows and tells. The result is a highly readable, deeply informed book that should find a broad and appreciative audience.--Robert Folkenflik, University of California, Irvine

Martin offers a convincing psychological study.--Leah Price"New York Times Book Review" (02/01/2009)

[Martin] is a literary conduit, bringing Johnson from the 18th-century English Tory world of letters down to the modern reader... [He is] an author who writes with an eloquent propinquity, a delightful sense of companionship, about a figure otherwise clouded in antiquity... He shows why the man is still so influential and--important this--still read.--Michael Coren"National Post" (09/19/2009)

As author also of A Life of James Boswell, Martin knows the territory and obviously enjoys it... The tercentenary of the birth of so large a figure is more than enough reason for new perspectives, and Martin's work is worthwhile.--G. Shivel"Choice" (07/01/2009)

Building on his previous work on James Boswell, Samuel Johnson's most celebrated biographer, Peter Martin has written a humane, coherent and accessible life of the great eighteenth-century polymath, deftly and sympathetically exploring his personal relationships and psyche while also locating him in the literary culture of his age.--Henry Hitchings, author of Dr Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World