On this day in 1795 James Boswell, diarist and biographer of Dr Samuel Johnson, died.
James Boswell's name is rarely heard separately from that of Dr Samuel Johnson whose biography he wrote, and with whom he travelled through the west of Scotland in a journey famously recorded in his published journal. It was only in the mid-twentieth century, when many of his writings were re-discovered and published in full, that the extent of Boswell's talent came to be appreciated. As a perceptive and witty recorder of the social life of the later part of the eighteenth century, he had few rivals.
