are in travel literature are twin classics that cover the same excursion. In 1773, Dr Samuel Johnson with his devoted biographer James Boswell set off on a visit to the Hebrides. Two years later Johnson&rsquos book
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
 was released. Johnson did not welcome the idea of competition during his lifetime and it was only in 1785, a year after his death, that Boswell issued his own version called
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
. The combined versions were eventually published by Oxford University Press in 1924 after being collated by R.W. Chapman during World War I. Chapman had edited them while manning a six-inch naval gun in Macedonia.
The raunchy Boswell makes much of Johnson dancing a reel on the Isle of Skye and meeting with Bonnie Prince Charlie&rsquos helpmate Flora MacDonald. The good doctor also presented a book to a young lady who was claimed to be the inspiration for the ballad Four and Twenty Virgins Came Down From Inverness. I read recently that the diminutive island of Little Cumbrae has been gifted to Baba Ramdev. A former ecclesiast, Reverend Adams would have grandly prayed for &ldquothe inhabitants of Cumbrae and the adjacent islands of Great Britain&rdquo, had he heard the news.
