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Dictionary man

David Nokes, a prominent scholar of 18th-century English literature, takes a fresh look at Samuel Johnson, the man known as the creator of the dictionary, in "Samuel Johnson: A Life" (Henry Holt and Company, $30). In doing so, Nokes shows a very human side of Johnson, and the perspective of his times.

Poverty was Johnson's companion for much of his life. A lack of money kept him from graduating from Oxford, which set up a poignant effort to have Oxford honor him, "allowing him to write himself A.M. in the title page" of his recently completed dictionary.

He was forced to live in squalor and was arrested for nonpayment of debts when he was well past middle age. This was perhaps what led him to coin his memorable phrase, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."

Johnson left behind a huge collection of oft repeated quotes, including, "I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use."

Award winner

Mexican writer Jose Emilio Pacheco has won the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor - the Cervantes Prize, Spain's Culture Ministry said.

Pacheco, 70, is a poet, novelist, journalist, essayist and literary critic. "We've defined him as representing the whole of our language," said Jose Antonio Pascual Rodriguez, a member of the Cervantes Prize jury and representative of the Spanish Royal Academy.

"He's an exceptional poet of daily life, with a depth, a freedom of thought, an ability to create his own world, an ironic distance from reality when it's necessary," Pascual Rodriguez said.

The Mexico City native is widely regarded as one of his country's foremost poets and short narrative writers. He is best known for his bittersweet accounts of adolescents growing up in a less crowded - but corrupt and unjust - Mexico of the 1940s and '50s.

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