How serendipitous when a latter day Boswell like myself finds his Jonson!

No, not that kind of “Johnson” … but a Samuel Johnson whose first name is Paul.

I’d never heard of him till today … Paul Johnson, I mean.

Karl Marx

Samuel Johnson was an exotic figure out of 18th Century England who, aside from being afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome, was also afflicted with literary genius.

James Boswell was his devoted biographer.

My Johnson is decidedly a Brit genius out of the 20th Century and, if you can believe it, afflicted, as I have been, with the Jesuits!

Studied in his teen years, as I had, with The Black Robes!!

He is also, not like I, a brilliant historian! (more…)

It’s the kind of movie “best” lists were made for, and over the years it’s been on plenty of them: Best Movie Quote, Best Song, Best Villain, Most Thrills. It boasts both the most famous car in movie history and what novelist Anthony Horowitz once called “perhaps the most bizarre murder in literature.” It spawned both 1964’s best-selling toy among tots and that year’s “sexiest man alive” among adults. It remains the most beloved entry in the single most profitable cinematic series of all time — adjusted for inflation, the movie cost only twenty-four-million dollars to make, yet brought in an epochal 853 million at the box office.

It’s Goldfinger (1964), and a half-century on the thrills, chills, eroticism, adventure, and luster invoked by that name all remain undimmed. According to one estimate, over a quarter of the world’s population has seen a James Bond film. That marks Goldfinger as not only a blockbuster, but as the harbinger of a profound cultural phenomenon.

Secret agent James Bond was introduced to the British public in 1953 via the novel Casino Royale, published in an initial print run of less than five-thousand copies. Author Ian Fleming quietly cranked out a novel a year for nearly a decade, with each languishing on the mystery-novel midlist alongside dozens of other now-forgotten titles from other writers. Sales were reasonable, but hardly spectacular.

Then on March 17, 1961, an article appeared in Life magazine called “The President’s Voracious Reading Habits.” Included on a list of “Ten Kennedy Favorites” was the 1957 Bond novel From Russia, With Love (over thirty years later, some choice praise from President Bill Clinton would deliver a similar jump-start to the career of African-American mystery writer Walter Mosley). The Kennedy Bond-boost, combined with the appearance of the first film (1962’s Dr. No), served to increase Fleming’s sales exponentially. By 1964 he had some forty million books in print. But the movie version of Goldfinger changed everything. In just the first year after it rocketed into theaters, an astonishing twenty-seven million more Bond books flew off the shelves. (more…)