Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson is that of Joshua Reynolds's late-1760s portrait: bareheaded, hands clawed, the picture of a great intellect tormented. But the writer's careful not to overplay Johnson's famous, socially disabling tics. Indeed, Martin seems determined not to make a freak of his subject and chapter titles such as "Stepping on the Duckling" and "Suffering Chimeras" disguise an empathetic account. Likewise, it is Johnson's moral essays that Martin would take to his desert island, works Johnson's contemporaries thought insufficiently sexy. For Martin, though, their writer is a genius, "pushing for human connections and revelations… insisting on honesty (his own and ours), realism and truth to experience".