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In Our Time
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The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age are illuminated by some of the best minds. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. |
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BIOGRAPHY
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| "I'm fascinated by the fact that we live in a time when so many people are doing fantastic work, and thinking in areas which it's not remotely possible for me to keep up with & and these people are prepared to talk about it. They're prepared to come on In Our Time and other programmes on Radio 4 and try and talk to the rest of us ..." |
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SAMUEL JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE
Read audience comments on this edition
Go to our research page to find out more about this subject.
"There is no arguing with Johnson, for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt of it." The poet Oliver Goldsmith was not alone in falling victim to the bludgeoning wit of Samuel Johnson. The greatest luminaries of eighteenth century England, including the painter Joshua Reynolds, the philosopher Edmund Burke and the politician Charles James Fox, all deferred to him ... happily or otherwise.
Samuel Johnson was credited with defining English literature with his Lives of the Poets and his edition of Shakespeare, and of defining English language with his Dictionary. Yet despite those lofty acclamations he failed to get a degree, claimed he had never finished a book, was an inveterate hack who told his friend James Boswell, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money".
How did an Oxford drop-out become England 's most famous and well connected man of letters? How did generations of readers come to see him as the father of English Literature? And why is he so little read today?
Contributors
John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London
Jim McLaverty, Professor of English at Keele University
Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London
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