Boswell would never have done that. He had far too much integrity to edit out something simply because it made it made him look silly in hindsight. Facts always meant more to him than his own dignity. He sometimes even went to extremes laughing at himself (as you will see in the Tour to the Hebrides).
He was an interesting man. His diaries are excruciatingly honest, and often don’t show him in a very positive light. He was painfully aware of that, but the truth always mattered more to him.
His theories about slavery and about inequality being good for society were just that – abstract intellectual theories, that bore almost no relation to how he actually lived his life. For example, he was on excellent terms with Johnson’s black ex-slave servant Francis Barber (‘more a friend than a servant’ to Johnson, as Boswell says), and had only praise for him, unlike some of Johnson’s less progressive associates.
Boswell’s friends were mostly extreme left-wingers (if I can use a modern term that doesn’t really apply), and he was a strong supporter of the American Revolution, and the Corsican fight for independence.
It’s also remarkable how much time and energy he sometimes spent helping poor people in trouble, even neglecting his own best interests to do so.
Thinking of Superdude’s last post: My wife and I met Mother Divine shortly before she died in 2017.
According to the best biography of her husband, Mother Divine’s mother in law and father in law were already adults when freed from slavery at the end of the Civil War.
(However, this is contrary to beliefs of the International Peace Mission Movement religion.)
I watched the first part of Peter Jackson’s Beatles doc. I didn’t know the original lyrics to “Get Back” were a parody of racists telling immigrants to get back to Pakistan, Puerto Rico, etc.
On the subject of the Beatles and long lives, in the 1960s, the Beatles met the philosopher and activist Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell’s mother died when he was two, and he was raised by his grandparents, one of whom was the former Prime Minister Earl Russell, who had entered Parliament in 1813 and who had met Napoleon on Elba.
So Paul McCartney has known someone, who knew someone, who met Napoleon.
I had never heard of the Morphy number, so that was interesting. Judging from the wiki article, simultaneous exhibitions count, in which case I have a Morphy number of 5.
A long time ago, when I actually played chess, I took part in a simultaneous exhibition that John Nunn did. John Nunn has a Morphy number of 4.
The company asked 18 designers from 18 countries spanning five continents to photoshop an image of a woman to fit their perception of the culture’s beauty standards.