When a man is tired of Samuel Johnson, he’s tired of life.
James Boswell intended his biography of Dr Johnson, published in 1791, to be no mere chronology, but a life packed with the minutiae of ‘volatile details’. Thus he presented a deluge of correspondence, liberal literary extracts and copious Latin quotations; extensive conversations with ‘utterances from that great and illuminated mind’ (always prefaced by an emphatic ‘Sir!’), as well as the abject prayers poured from what Johnson called his ‘soul polluted by many sins’. Delivered with magnificent aplomb by David Timson, Johnson bursts from these 51 hours as an intellectual and physical colossus.
Timson’s vocal range for the variety of texts is masterly, and his accents are superb, from Johnson’s Birmingham, as rough ‘slow and deliberate’ as his shambling manner, to Boswell’s brisk and elegant Scots, and the prim, pedantic Irish of Oliver Goldsmith.
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