Gordon Turnbull (18:15)

What does home mean? The question is not as simple as it seems. For James Boswell, his home in Ayrshire was both a sanctuary and a safe haven and an irksome confinement – and for many around the globe, the coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally altered the ways we relate to the place we call home.

Boswell was born and raised in Edinburgh, and from his youth attracted to the metropolitan glamour of London, but he never shook free of his ancestral county, which exerted a profound and sometimes contradictory pull on his emotions.

Gordon Turnbull, General Editor of the Yale Boswell Editions from 1997 to 2021, reveals Ayrshire as Boswell recorded it in his diaries and letters: source of ancestral pride, and of dynastic anxiety; of agricultural tedium, and of blessed respite from urban pace and bustle. In the end, as Boswell’s candid autobiographical records show, no matter how far we roam, the place of our origins remains a core part of identity.