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Podcast: Arts & Ideas
Episode: Samuel Johnson's circle
Description: "We suffer from Johnson" - those words come in a poem written by his friend, the diarist Hester Thrale Piozzi (who died May 2nd 1821). Patience Agbabi's new novel time travels back to eighteenth century London and takes its teenage heroes to a tea party at Samuel Johnson's house. Thomas Lawrence sketched his biographer Boswell. His Jamaican servant Francis Barber inherited his watch. So Laurence Scott convenes his own virtual tea party to look at Samuel Johnson's world.New Generation Thinker Sophie Coulombeau is co-organiser of the first international conference on Hester Thrale Piozzi and will share her...