Via @scotlit, a great piece on Boswell:
"the main question commentators try to answer is this: how did the worst man in the world manage to write the best biography?"
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/10/22/when-the-worst-man-in-the-world-writes-a-masterpiece/
"By all accounts, including his own, he was an idiot. ... His descendants hid [his] portrait in the attic because they were ashamed of being related to him ... When Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon were elected to The Literary Club, Boswell considered leaving because he thought the club had now "lost its select merit"!"