Boswell painstakingly transforms an almost scholarly profusion of detail into a perceptive, lifelike portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson. Boswell spent a great deal of time with Johnson in his final years and from his scrupulously accurate memory and copious journal was able to record faithfully the brilliance and wit of Dr. Johnson’s conversation. Boswell’s aim and achievement was completeness; no detail was too small for him. On this point Dr. Johnson remarked to him: There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. Boswell’s thirst for detail makes this indisputably the finest of many contemporary biographies of Johnson.