You're listening to a London Review of Books podcast.

Good evening everybody and welcome to the third of this year's London Review of Books

winter lecture series and to the lecture this evening by Andrew Hagen. The LRB lectures

at the museum are a great opportunity for us to hear distinguished critics thinking about the

issues that the museum tries to address in different ways through its collections through its exhibitions.

And one of the great benefits of it is to remind us all that when the museum was created in the 1750s, it was, of course, a library as well as a museum.

And the distinction between the two was not so clear. And indeed, between the founding of the museum by Parliament in 1753

and the opening in 759

was, of course, the great moment of the publication of Johnson's Dictionary,

another attempt to gather a world of experience into one place. And of course, as you all know, Johnson wouldn't

have been anything without Boswell. And if there's one person today who I think one could

compare to Boswell in London, it would be this evening's speaker. The point of the museum at that stage was a very radical one to find a place where the public could consider objects and texts that would allow them to think in a different way and to challenge the established orthodoxies.

It was the place where dangerous texts were studied and published.

And that is, of course, one of the themes of this evening's lecture about dangerous texts.

And is also, of course, one of the purposes of the museum still to allow the study of the things

to challenge and to subvert the agreed orthodoxies.

We're particularly grateful to Joanna Biggs at the London Review of Books for her work on this,

and of course to Mary Kay Wilmer's, the editor who has really been the instigator of the whole series.

But I want to come back to Johnson and Boswell.

Boswell was but one of the many, many Scots who flocked to London in the middle of the 18th century,

producing such irritation later in the

century that by the 1780s and 90s, you could find this wonderful satirical print by Newton

...