Helen Deutsch writes:

Peter Martin’s introduction to the tercentenary edition of Selected Writings sets up an echo chamber of affirmations of Johnson’s eternal appeal ranging from Ruskin to Beckett to Seamus Heaney to that American avatar of Johnson, Harold Bloom, who places Johnson’s literary criticism within the ‘ancient genre of wisdom writing’. Focusing on only a ‘portion of Johnson … the moralist and critic’ (though he could be described as a moralist in almost all of his writings), Martin sees the Rambler as the heart of any Johnson collection.

(LRB 9 February 2012)

Harvard | Paperback 536 pp. |ISBN: 9780674060340