A Quote by Thomas B. Macaulay

Boswell is the first of biographers.

Thomas B. Macaulay

Quote Topics

Biographers First

Quote Author

Thomas B. Macaulay
British - Politician
October 25, 1800 - December 28, 1859

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.

Thomas B. Macaulay

Johnson is wise, Boswell foolish; Johnson warns and abstains, Boswell plunges; Johnson is rather a great man writing than a greatwriter, Boswell is a great writer and an ordinary man; and they are two of a kind, abysmal melancholics and compulsive socializers, afraid of solitude and afraid of death and dissolution, victims of themselves, meant for each other, needing each other, needing evidence and arguments (Boswell is a lawyer, Johnson magisterially dictates to him some of his briefs), making beautiful models of rational discourse out of the useful substance of all they know.

Marvin Mudrick

Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.

Claire Tomalin

Every suit I wear is custom-made by a guy named Waraire Boswell in L.A.

Raphael Saadiq

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

I think that I had better go, Holmes." "Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.

Amity Shlaes

Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject.

Michael Korda

Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs.

Claire Tomalin

Working in the service of the dead, biographers quit their labors only when the sole remaining task is the impossible- resurrection.

Laura Furman

My biographers... would like to have my time at the court almost complete before they finish the book. We decided... to flip the order.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood.

Anne Applebaum

I went to my father's at night. He spoke of poor John [Boswell's brother] with disgust. I was shocked and said, "He's your son, and God made him." He answered very harshly, "If my sons are idiots, can I help it?