Burlington Public Library

In Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of English literature is revealed with unparalleled immediacy and originality, in a biography to which we owe much of our knowledge of the man himself. Through a series of richly detailed anecdotes, Johnson emerges as a sociable figure, vigorously engaging and fencing with great contemporaries such as Garrick, Goldsmith, Burney and Burke, and of course with Boswell himself. Yet anxieties...

"In T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Gordon brings fascinating new material together in one volume with the best of her earlier work. She draws on scores of recently discovered letters, and addresses in full the issue of Eliot's anti-Semitism as well as the less-noted issue of his misogyny, his "disgust with the flesh in conflict with repressed desires." She also provides an unparalleled portrait of Eliot's first wife, Vivienne, and a compelling exploration...

"A twentieth-century intellectual of the first rank presents the case for the nineteenth-century aesthetician whose elegant subversions delivered us to modernism. Walter Pater (1839-1894) was an obscure Oxford don until 1873, when his first book, The Renaissance, exposed his argument favoring sensation over thought and, in doing so, ignited a hard, gem-like flame. "Say not what it is but what it makes you see - or feel" is not something Pater ever...