Samuel Johnson, a bookseller’s son from Lichfield, achieved fame as a poet and moral essayist before completing his most famous work, The Dictionary of the English Language.James Boswell had known him for exactly ten years when they set out together for the Hebrides in 1773. Son of a Scottish judge and himself a lawyer, Boswell is celebrated as much for the disarming honesty of his diaries as for his great biography of Johnson.Formerly a lecturer in Celtic at the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, Ronald Black is Gaelic Editor of the Scotsman. As well as various anthologies and studies of eighteenth- and twentieth-century Gaelic verse, he has published The Gaelic Otherworld, a new edition of the folklore collections of the Rev. John Gregorson Campbell of Tiree.

Ronald Black (Raghnall MacilleDhuibh) is a retired Senior Lecturer in Celtic Studies at the University of Edinburgh and Gaelic Editor of the Scotsman. He is a regular broadcaster and contributes to a wide variety of newspapers and journals. He lives in Peebles, Scotland.