Volume 48, Number 14 · September 20, 2001
Triumph of an Artist
By Richard Holmes
A Life of James Boswell
by Peter Martin
Yale University Press, 613 pp., $35.00
Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson
by Adam Sisman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 351 pp., $25.00
If you walk eastward across London's Covent Garden (carefully avoiding the fire-eaters, the street mimes, and other performance artists), you will come to a small, neat row of Georgian houses called Russell Street. About thirty yards along Russell Street on the right-hand side, above a modern Italian coffeehouse, you can see a round blue plaque up on the first-floor brickwork. It is half obscured by a homely window box of dusty red geraniums. This modest site is, arguably, the sacred birthplace of modern English biography.
Review, 5435 words
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