Fellow diners enjoyed Johnson's wit after having watched him tear into his vittles like a beast at a kill.

From the February 2014 Literary Review. Frances Wilson has a wonderful opening essay, The Lost Art of Table Talk, which really should be quoted in its entirety. So much well said and so little extra.

There was once a vogue for recording the things that writers and other 'eminent figures' said while they supped. These books, generally known as 'table talk', form a curious and now sadly extinct genre. Part gossip, part biography, they are also a variety of boastful memoir. As Samuel Rogers - poet, banker and echo chamber of the Regency dining room - puts it in the preface to Table-Talk, his recollections of the conversations of, among others, Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Byron and the Duke of Wellington (recently republished by Notting Hill Editions), he personally 'heard them talk as they did, when they were most at their ease' and shared 'what so few had the privilege of enjoying'. Lady Blessington and Thomas Medwin both promoted their acquaintance with Byron through their collections of his "Conversations', just as Boswell drew himself up alongside the Great Cham in his Life of Samuel Johnson - the only example we have of biography as table talk.

And

Collections of table talk always reinforce for me a sense of the past as more elegant than the present; even when no one was listening, these people said moving things. Or things that were moving because no one was listening.

On Johnson.

Fellow diners enjoyed Johnson's wit after having watched him tear into his vittles like a beast at a kill. According to Boswell, Johnson's expression when dining was riveted on his plate; he became 'totally absorbed in the business of the moment'. He said not a word and 'nor would he pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled and generally a strong perspiration was visible'. Boswell doubted that Johnson's presence at the table conformed with what was expected of a philosopher, but the horror of watching him satisfy his stomach did nothing to stem the flow of invitations.

Artful conversation is such a pleasure, enhanced by its rarity.