A bonus episode to share the extraordinary detail and richness of the real-time, live-streamed account James Boswell gives us of his first love affair in 1760s London. This may be the closest we can ever come to understanding what passion was like in an age of sexual libertinism and STDs before antibiotics. In our last episode, we talked about Boswell’s long-lost London journal of 1762-63, finally published in 1951. We talked briefly about Boswell’s fling with an actor called Louisa. In this bonus episode, we want to do full justice to that story because it is an astonishing document. We are all familiar with the way that story-tellers - from Jane Austen to Bridgerton - depict 18th century seduction scenes, but Boswell gives us the real thing, transcribing dialogue as and when it happened.

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