Category: Imagination
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New Year Resolutions – James Boswell Style
I gave up making New Year Resolutions some years back because like most people I never stuck to them and often never even got started. I think for 2026, I’ll try a technique used by the young James Boswell, author of the great Life of Samuel Johnson (in short: To…
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On the Hunt With a Boswell Guidebook
I’m aware that when I travel around Scotland I’m often crossing the path of my literary hero, James Boswell. The most recent example was while I was travelling north up the east coast of Scotland…something Boswell and Samuel Johnson did, but in a carriage, in 1773. I made a short…
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An Airplane View onto Explorers of 1773
On Wednesday 18 August 1773 a little boat sailed across the Firth of Forth from Leith to Kinghorn, carrying passengers James Boswell, the Scottish lawyer and writer, his servant Joseph Ritter, the hugely famous Samuel ‘Dictionary’ Johnson, and Scots advocate William Nairne. On Thursday 17 July 2025, I departed Edinburgh…
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Dr Beattie, Boswell and Johnson. Friends.
Discovering Scottish Philosopher Dr James Beattie. Often, in these little blog posts I’m trying to understand the pleasure I get in reading about historical figures. In this one I got a surprise in spotting a familiar name in an unexpected place and then a sense of connection, of completion, when…
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Le Voyage de Boswell et Johnson aux Hébrides
I have a French language version of the combined accounts of Boswell and Johnson’s 1773 tour of Scotland, it’s called Voyage dans les Hébrides. My French isn’t good enough to fluently read this book (yet), but I’ve read the Boswell and Johnson accounts in English so I know the story…
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Boswell’s Complaint, Portnoy’s Complaint
In 1969, American writer Philip Roth published his fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s a tough read for a man who’s almost sixty (that’s me), but for a young man of nineteen (that was me back in 1984) – it was…awesome. It’s a psychiatrist’s chair-account of Alexander Portnoy’s struggle as a…
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If the Temple Bar was a Time / Space Portal
If you sit at a table on the terrace outside Paul, the French cafe behind St Paul’s Cathedral, London, you can easily daydream away thirty minutes gazing into the relocated Temple Bar monument. The two storey stone…edifice (I’m trying not to repeat the word ‘monument’), was London’s principal entrance from…
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4 Hour Boswell-Johnson London Walking Tour
Last week I found myself in London with time on my hands, so I devised a short tour of points-of-interest related to that venerable concatenation of Boswell and Johnson. I started early at Paternoster Square in the City and walked it in four hours, but you could do it less…
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Cinema in the Eighteenth Century
Picture this: the year is 1772, you work as a farrier’s apprentice at a Darlington coaching inn, a lucky appointment because the owner of the inn allows you to read books from his little collection. That’s the year the innkeeper takes ownership of an edition of Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770 poem…
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The ‘Foosteps Principle’ of Richard Holmes
A daydream of mine is to go to the Netherlands and visit the places James Boswell inhabited when he was at Utrecht University (1763-64). Ahhh the Eighteenth century. The challenges are not insurmountable: the second-most being to find the time to do it, and the first being to persuade my…
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Eighteenth Century as Seen by its Inhabitants
Our imaginations are rendering machines of infinite capacity. We can conjure anything we want in our mind’s eye and, for the moment anyway, only we can tap into them. But don’t rely just on the text in your favourite book to fuel your Eighteenth century day dreams, get creative and…
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