“... with Sister Wendy, then a television art historian, on the subject of this painting. According to Plutarch, Phocion’s wife gathered the ashes to her breast; according to Sister Wendy, she mixed them with water and ate them. Either way, for Gillian the act was one of good-enough love and ‘a finite act of political justice’: ‘In these delegitimate acts ...”

“... 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 sophistication and ...”