Library Notes

Boswell points to a statue and asks Johnson if it is indecent. “No, sir,” Johnson replies, “but your remark is.”

In this late-nineteenth-century collection of essays, A. P. Russell begins with a deceptively simple puzzle: why can two people look at the same thing and see different truths? From a critic’s one-sided gaze to the endlessly varied grains of a seashore, Russell gathers sharp observations and literary voices to show how experience, prejudice, and feeling shape our judgments. Most of all, he asks us to look again at human character: a person may seem noble from one angle, mean or monstrous from another, and no quick label can contain the whole. If every observer sees only a fragment, how can we ever judge one another fairly?

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