James Boswell was also a journalist and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This fascinating collection, edited by Paul Tankard, presents a generous and varied selection of Boswell’s journalistic writings, most of which have not been published since the eighteenth century. It offers a new angle on the history of journalism, an idiosyncratic view of literature, politics, and public life in late eighteenth-century Britain, and an original perspective on a complex and engaging literary personality.

In 2018, The Bibliographical Society of America awarded the sixth triennial William L. Mitchell Prize for Bibliography or Documentary Work on Early British Periodicals or Newspapers to Paul Tankard for Facts and Inventions.1