“... his attackers, Plutarch writes, ‘he covered his head with his toga and let himself fall.’ Suetonius adds that, according to some reports, he said in Greek: ‘Kai su, teknon’ (which Shakespeare turned into the Latin ‘Et tu, Brute?’). It literally means ‘You too, child,’ but what Caesar may have intended by the words isn’t clear. Tempest ...”

“... the softer name of Timberio, insist that the death toll was much exaggerated by muck-rakers like Suetonius). The court of Freud was similarly absolutist in its punishments: if you displeased him – by bad timekeeping, unprofessionalism, or disobedience to his will – you were tossed over the cliff. In the painting which shows Wyndham flaubertising in the ...”

“... these fundamental obstacles – familiar to life-writers everywhere since the days of Suetonius and Plutarch – prompt in Malcolm a kind of epistemological distress. ‘The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,’ she says at one point; ‘Almost everything we know we know incompletely at best.’In turn, her literary ...”