WE are apt to think of this great book as the work of a pious, not overclean old scholar, much given to talk and tea, and somewhat too fond of abusing people. It will come, therefore, as a surprise to ...

For the 250th anniversary of Dr. Samuel Johnson's most famous achievement, Hitchings's charming philology-as-biography shows Johnson to be no mere compiler of words but, as he himself put it, "a ...