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(n. Boswell, Boswellism)

Dr Samuel Johnson’s obsessive admirer James Boswell (1740–95) has given us an eponym which is so apt for our age of bloggers who never miss a detail of the lives of celebrities.

It is thanks to this Scottish lawyer and minor aristocrat, the 9th Laird of Auchinleck, that we know so much about Dr Samuel Johnson whose dictionary is the forerunner of all books which try to delineate the English language – including this one.

His early diaries of his travels in Europe were notable in themselves, but his life of Johnson (1791) and the brilliant journal, Tour to the Hebrides, saw Boswell at his very best, the book being a template for both travel writing and celebrity gossip memoirs. Despite the fact that, by his own admission, he shipped an ocean of booze in his life, Boswell remained a fastidious diarist and wrote of his encounters with famous people and prostitutes alike.

‘Boswellian’ has thus come to describe an obsessive chronicler and fan of another, when it could just as easily mean excessively lustful or practically alcoholic.