Johnson, when he made his bargain with the booksellers, expected that he would be able to complete the work in about three years, and, when a friend pointed out that it took the French Academy, which ...

Defining the World The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by Henry Hitchings Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., $24 JONATHAN SWIFT, the tetchy author of Gulliver's Travels, rarely minced ...

He was, according to his biographer James Boswell, a huge man. When he was barely out of infancy, he contracted scrofula, a disease that severely impaired his eyesight and left his face horribly ...

Samuel Johnson died 222 years ago, and in all that time there has been surprisingly little agreement about what he thought about many important questions. He wrote about politics: Some see him as a ...

Ian Redford is playing legendary lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson in Max Stafford-Clark’s Out of Joint production A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson at the Arts Theatre. Here he reveals how he became ...

But Johnson’s Dictionary just lies there, splayed like a patient etherised upon a table, or a specimen readied for dissection. It can’t be browsed or thumbed, its pages can’t be ruffled; you can’t ...

To Londoners who happened to spot the notice in the Daily Advertiser one day in 1747, it must have seemed less an announcement than a boast: “There is now preparing for the press, and in great ...