Fairfax House :

Fri 7 Sep :

7.00pm – 8.30pm :

£14.00 (Members: £12.00, Students: £8.00)

Samuel Johnson was a critic, an essayist, a poet and a biographer. A polymath and a great conversationalist, his intellectual and social curiosity were boundless. Yet he was a deeply melancholy man, haunted by dark thoughts, sickness and a diseased imagination.

In his own life, both public and private, he sought to choose a virtuous and prudent path, negotiating everyday hazards and temptations. His writings and aphorisms illuminate what it means to lead a life of integrity, and his experience, abundantly documented by him and by others, is a lesson in the art of regulating the mind and the body.

Henry Hitchings was born in 1974. He has written mainly about language and history, starting in 2005 with Dr Johnson’s Dictionary. The Secret Life of Words (2008) won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award, as well as seeing him shortlisted for the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. 2011′s The Language Wars completed what was in effect a trilogy of books about language. He is a prolific critic and has made several programmes for radio and television, on subjects including Erasmus Darwin, the eighteenth-century English novel and the history of manners. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Twitter: @henryhitchings

Website: http://henryhitchings.com/index.html

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