The book’s challenge is to carve out a literary-critical approach that brings all sides of Lawrence’s verbal art forms together as a recognisable whole, but not by the traditional means of defining an underlying philosophy. Instead a bio-bibliographically informed approach traces Lawrence’s developing imaginary, his unfolding intellectual project, along highways and byways alike until his broader oeuvre-in-process becomes the object of study. The book analyses work-versions, where significant developments are materially witnessed, rather than confining attention to the works’ published forms. Zooming in to focus on changed patterns and wordings on this manuscript or that typescript is followed by a pulling back to survey the wider patterning and stylistic shift. Cross-currents from his reading, marriage and friendships circulated through his contemporaneous writings in all its forms. This shifting repertoire of image and idea was increasingly organised by a structural habit of projecting polarised fundamentals into staged encounters with his subject matter. A text-gambler, Lawrence would trust this performative approach to dictate the movement of idea and attitude.

The introduction justifies telling the story of the forgotten bully Louis Bieral. His life was extraordinary not only because of his interactions with famous people, but also because of his wide range of adventures. Moreover, his brutal career helps us understand the importance of private, nonlethal violence to the operation of nineteenth-century America.

Insofar as his poems generally take the mimetic form of a monologue unfolding in the present, Pindaric poetry is the Pindaric speaking voice. Far more of the corpus, furthermore, is directly concerned with the speaking subject than with any other individual. But the identity and functions of this prominent and indeed all-encompassing voice have been a persistent source of fascination and puzzlement, not least in their relationship to Pindar of Thebes as a historical individual. Better understanding the scare quotes around the ‘I’ in the title of this chapter can help us to better understand Pindar’s poetry. Scholars have formulated various ways to refer to the speaking voice, and the accumulation of terminology reflects the complexity of the topic. This chapter offers a taxonomy of voices and then criticises that taxonym. It discusses the ‘bardic I’, the ‘first-person indefinite’, the authorial voice, and the choral voice and then argues that the victor never speaks in epinicians. A conclusion briefly ties these threads together.

Chapter 15 provides a biographical analysis of Manley O. Hudson’s role as a networker between the League of Nations and American elites during the interwar period. As a professor at Harvard Law School, Hudson played a pivotal role in advancing the League’s agenda in the United States. Through his extensive travels and engagements with American elites, Hudson circulated information, offered advice, and forged connections that helped to shape the American perspective on international law. The chapter examines how Hudson’s life and profession shaped his development into a prominent figure in a transatlantic network formed around the League of Nations system. Drawing on Hudson’s private papers and other archives, the chapter situates his intellectual and professional work within its social and historical context. By exploring Hudson’s intersecting roles as practitioner, advocate, and academic, we gain insight into his evolution as a leading American international lawyer. This examination allows us to understand the self-perception and worldview of one of the key figures in the development of international law and the complex relationship between the League and the United States. The chapter contributes to the trend in international and transnational history that uses biography to portray transnational spaces and experiences beyond national frameworks.

Although everything we know about Ignatius Sancho’s early life comes to us from a short biographical sketch written by the lawyer Joseph Jekyll (1754–1837) as a preface to Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African (1782), much of this is unsubstantiated and some appears improbable, exaggerated, or even invented. This chapter accordingly offers a critical reassessment and attempts a historical reconstruction of Jekyll’s “Life of Ignatius Sancho.” It offers a possible version of events that may explain Jekyll’s account of Sancho’s childhood journey from Cartagena to London. It argues, however, that the challenge of verifying much of “The Life” remains insurmountable at present and we can better understand “The Life” as a rhetorical intervention in the early phase of the British abolition campaign rather than as an unproblematic record of historical events. Jekyll’s “Life” may offer the reader, this chapter concludes, a moral rather than a literal truth.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Walter Pater’s elusive personal life and his works. Addressing how the dynamics between the two have been a touchstone in criticism of Pater, it asks how we can reasonably read the autobiographical and self-reflexive dimensions of Pater’s writings. It illustrates how writers who encountered Pater – from Oscar Wilde to Edmund Gosse – reflected on the difficulties of knowing him beneath his courteous exterior. It considers how Pater himself figured personal life of writers and artists of whom he wrote. Addressing Pater’s ‘tact’ and ‘reserve’, quoting from the unpublished manuscript ‘The Aesthetic Life’, it considers Oxford Hellenism and the revelation of Pater’s involvement with William Money Hardinge.

Elizabeth Bowen’s major novels display her lifelong preoccupation with disappointment, discord, and desire between mismatched lovers. Like their author, these characters seek genuine connection to remedy abandonment by beloved figures. This chapter uses ‘love’ in its most comprehensive sense, encompassing infatuation, sexual attraction, and unconsummated desire, as well as romantic and sexual attachment. Bowen’s keen awareness of social norms and customs shapes her plotting and foregrounds the complex interplay of private desires and public expectations. Three thematic strands dominate her portrayal of lovers: unrequited love, typically involving younger female protagonists and older, more experienced partners; transgressive love, for entanglements featuring characters who break taboos through their relationships; and illicit love, featuring secretive protagonists fearing exposure to public judgement. Across Bowen’s oeuvre, past lovers or previous relationships haunt the narrative present. Unrequited, transgressive, or illicit love might be buried or repressed, but ultimately it causes emotional disturbances for lovers in the present.

The musicological literature has tended to focus on Giulio Strozzi’s career as a librettist, and on his participation in three academies, Ordinati in Rome, and the Incogniti, and its musical offshoot, the Unisoni, in Venice. In this chapter I discuss two biographies published about Strozzi during his lifetime, one of them quite well known (present in the Le Glorie de gli Incogniti), the other one less so (from Gian Vittorio Rossi’s Pinacotheca Imaginum Illustrium). I will highlight the means by which these biographies nuance Strozzi’s time before he became one of Venice’s most noted librettists. I offer new insight into Strozzi’s time in Rome (circa 1601–1615), and suggest that, contrary to his published Incogniti biography, he most likely never earned a degree in law from the University of Pisa.

This chapter examines Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and its model of logical context. Against readings that see it as purely anti-contextualist, the chapter shows how logic functions as a form of context in early Wittgenstein. Through biographical and historical context, it demonstrates how the Tractatus emerged from and responded to specific intellectual environments, while setting up the book’s broader argument about parallel developments in anthropology and philosophy.

This introductory chapter presents the main topics and orientations of the book. Its subject matter is the invention of technology, that is, the study of techniques in the twentieth-century human and social sciences – as grasped through the fundamental contributions made by André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986). Biographical background on his life and career highlights Leroi-Gourhan’s wide-ranging scientific productions in such fields as ethnology, museology, orientalism, art history, palaeontology, behavioural psychology and prehistoric archaeology, and indeed the archaeology and anthropology of techniques. The breadth of these contributions reflects a diversity of interests, but also a form of eclecticism or ‘in-discipline’. Alongside long-standing investments in documentary and experimental practices, his writings were structured around several conceptual keywords (‘techniques’, ‘milieu’, élan vital, Homo faber, ‘liberation’, ‘exteriorization’, chaîne opératoire) which varied over time and in function of their uses. In addition, Leroi-Gourhan’s extensive archives make it possible to address the literary ambitions and intellectual practices of the scientist in action.

Chapter 2 examines the balance between praise, precept, and criticism in comparisons of the dedicatees of translations with exemplary figures from ancient history. It argues that Anthony Cope’s The History of Hannibal and Scipio (1544) and Gabriel Harvey’s marginalia similarly applied Livy’s History of Rome as a guide to military action in Tudor England, but Cope also made a principled attempt to influence the direction of religious and political policy. The five Plutarchan Lives presented in manuscript to Henry VIII by Henry Parker, Lord Morley during the 1530s and 1540s rebuked the increasingly tyrannical king. William Master’s manuscript Life of Scipio mined the text for military stratagems as well as moral and other lessons. Thomas North’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579) supported the religio-political agenda of forward Protestants under the leadership of Leicester and Shakespeare’s Roman plays responded to North’s application of the Lives to Elizabethan England in their exploration of masculine martial valour and heroism.

The story of Diognete, a late fifth-century Athenian woman, provides a lens for thinking about how to write the history of women in classical Athens. The introduction considers the value of biographical approaches and other tools which treat women as individual subjects rather than members of categories. It explains the author’s decision to assign names to women whose names are lost or suppressed in the evidence, repositioning them as subjects of their own lives. It argues that the texts on inscribed dedications and gravestones commissioned by women were determined by the women themselves, leaving us with myriad female-authored texts. These texts inform the book’s experiential approach, which focuses on women’s own experiences of their lives.

Cohen did not shy away from autobiography in his work, and so his fans may have a sense that they already know his life story. Yet, except for his novel The Favourite Game, Cohen’s work typically makes unexplained references to his personal history rather than to narrate episodes of it. In order to provide a frame for the more particular aspects his life featured in later chapters, this chapter will offer an essayistic overview of Cohen’s life from his boyhood in the Westmont neighborhood of Montreal, to the Greek island of Hydra and the Chelsea Hotel, through his stays at Zen Monastery on Mt. Baldy, to his triumphant late tours necessitated by his manager’s theft. Along the way, Cohen encountered and was influenced by lovers, poets, other songwriters, and religious teachers, not to mention the family into which he was born and the more disparate one that he fathered.

Once one begins to investigate the intrigue aroused by the lack of feminist concerns in Daly’s manuscript, other intrigues quickly arise. Why did she write this text in the first place? Why did her publisher reject it? Why did she abandon it? Facing these intersecting intrigues, this essay develops the hypothesis that Daly’s central intellectual project – preventing and healing the “splitting” of the Church into polarized factions – mirrored a moment of splitting within her own identity, one that led to her exit from the Church. Moreover, the essay suggests that while the tensions that caused Daly’s theological splitting involved factors such as the women’s movement, Humanae Vitae, a speculative theological method, and a patriarchal church, it was actually the death of her mother that legitimated Daly’s abandonment of this manuscript and release from the sorts of theological and ecclesial engagements it contains.

In his Life of Isidore, Damascius, as I argue in Chapter 9, described the lives of a wide range of figures of his period as exemplifying to varying degrees success or failure in progress through the scale of virtues, thus providing an edificatory panorama of patterns of philosophical perfection, a panorama which could serve to inspire people beginning the study of philosophy. Many of these figures in Damascius’ account were able to achieve lives lived on the level of the political virtues, but few were able to attain higher levels of virtue and very few the highest levels. Yet these exceptional examples could also serve to inspire.

Porphyry and Iamblichus added further levels of virtue to Plotinus’ scale of virtues. In Chapter 8 I discuss Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life, which presents Pythagoras as a model of the political virtues. I show how, on this level, Iamblichus takes over Epicurean ideas about serenity, freedom from disturbance, a balanced control of desires and bodily needs and how, more generally, the Epicurean biographical practice of praising philosophical heroes as models to be imitated anticipates Iamblichus’ presentation of the figure of Pythagoras. I note also a wider use of Epicurean ethical ideas in Late Antique Platonism, in particular on the level of political virtues, the virtues of the discipline of bodily desires.