And In The Absence Of Facts, Myth

A Rich, Multi-dimensional Tour Of Naples, Most Brilliant, Battered, And Bewildering Of Cities, Here Fixed To The Page With Wit And élan. Splendid.

No One Sits On The Stoop When She's A Kid And Thinks, 'i Want To Be A Biographer When I Grow Up,'

An Interesting Thing About Book Groups, It Seems To Me, Is That There Is No Correlation Between A Brilliant Book And A Brilliant Discussion. The First Seems Sometimes Even To Undermine The Second.

And In The Absence Of Facts, Myth Rushes In, The Kudzu Of History.

I Checked To See If There’d Been A Really Good Book Published In The Last Few Decades. Then I Started With What Cleopatra Would Have Read, Asking Myself, “what Can We Know About Her Education?” It Turns Out To Be A Very Great Deal, And Bizarrely, No One Had Written About That Before.