18.06.2019, 18:00 P.M.
lecture and dinner
The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
Guest Speaker Leo Damrosch (author)
In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.”
In this book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, he conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth-century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.
Joseph Epstein wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “In The Club, as the actors appear one by one, surrounding Johnson and Boswell on Damrosch’s stage, we are transported back to a world of conversations, arguments, ideas, and writings. And in this vibrantly realized milieu, words rarely fail.”
The favor of an early reply is requested due to limited seating.
For more information please contact: Mr. Michael G. Kerrigan, Executive Director info@irishgeorgiansociety.com
Image: 'The Club', Yale Books