PositiveFinancial TimesDamrosch provides a very readable introduction to a group of people who, both individually and collectively, have fascinated scholars across the humanities and social sciences for centuries ... The Club is an unusual book: part group biography, part literary criticism and the cultural history of ideas, and part political and social history of 18th-century Britain. It is, in Damrosch’s words, \'a book with pictures\'—and lots of them, used to great effect. It takes the style of literary biography while recognizing how the development of that genre is indebted to Boswell himself, thanks to his innovative inclusion of conversation in his Life of Johnson ... While I confess to being slightly disappointed that there is not more on the intellectual content of meetings of The Club itself, what this genre does provide space for is the history of intellectual culture beyond privileged male spaces ... One of the many merits of this book is that Damrosch, emeritus professor of English literature at Harvard, is able to integrate the vital role played by women...who lacked the social freedom if not the intellectual abilities of their male counterparts.
