“... his name and lineage’.1 Motherhood was part of the public stage in another sense. According to Plutarch, the only exceptions to the rule against naming the dead on Sparta’s tombstones were men who fell in battle and women who died in childbirth: the woman, the producer of the future citizens of the city state, bore childbirth ‘just as the warrior bears ...”

“... 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 ...”