On this day in 1740 James Boswell, the biographer, diarist and travel writer was born in Edinburgh.
James Boswell's name is rarely heard separately from that of Dr Samuel Johnson whose biography he wrote. The two writers travelled through the west of Scotland in a journey famously recorded by Boswell in his published journals "A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland" and "The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides". 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.
