“... Change unnerved him, whether it was the nomination of the first woman to the Académie française (Marguerite Yourcenar), or the emergence of more radical forms of anthropology that examined the discipline’s complicity with empire, or questioned the anthropologist’s authority. Faced with a future he found unappetising, he turned further ...”

“... novel was consigned as a respectable literary form. In 1951 it came as something of a shock when Marguerite Yourcenar won the Prix Fémina for Mémoires d’Hadrien, so completely out of season did historical fiction of any kind – even such a strange anomaly as this one – seem in the true republic of letters. Did people still write that sort of ...”