The club that fuelled culture

Neither fame nor public position was required, and yet a surprising number of these friends would rise to lasting greatness.

The Club

Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age

Leo Damrosch

Yale University Press; $30; 473 pages
 
“O conversation the staff of life,” the young T S Eliot wrote to his Harvard friend and fellow poet Conrad Aiken in 1914. “Shall I get any at Oxford?” A newcomer to England, Eliot looked to London as a city that once had been a centre of civilisation. There, conversation among thinkers fizzing with originality had its acme in a club founded in 1764 by the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson and the portrait painter Joshua Reynolds. They asked