The Powers of Dr. Johnson

October 8, 2009

Andrew O’Hagan

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Samuel Johnson: A Biography
by Peter Martin
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 608 pp., $35.00                                                  

Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings
edited by Peter Martin
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 503 pp., $29.95                                                  

Samuel Johnson: The Struggle
by Jeffrey Meyers
Basic Books, 528 pp., $35.00                                                  

Samuel Johnson: A Life
by David Nokes
Henry Holt, 448 pp., $32.00 (to be published on October 27)                                                  

Britain is a very changed country; it has changed morally. It might be said that its people’s sense of what life is all about has altered more in the last fifty years than it did in the previous 250, beginning in 1709, when Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield. Yet one of the things that hasn’t changed is the popularity of the nation’s most popular word: “nice.”

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