Stacy Schiff

We have believed in any number of things - the tooth fairy, cold fusion, and benefits of smoking, the free lunch - that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are.

It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

Aikhenvald saw Véra as a fearless guide to Vladimir on __he poetic path._ She was on every count his champion. The wife of another émigré writer phrased it differently: __veryone in the Russian community knew who and what you meant when you said __erochka._ It meant a boxer who went into the fight and hit and hit.

Véra assumed her married name almost as a stage name; rarely has matrimony so much represented a profession. It was one of the ironies of the life that _ born at a time and place where women could and did lay claim to all kinds of ambitions _ she should elevate the role of wife to a high art. [_] Traditionally, a man changes his name and braces himself for fame; a woman changes hers and passes into oblivion. This was not to be Véra__ case, although she did gather her married name around her like a cloak, which she occasionally opened to startling effect. She would never be forced to make a woman__ historic choice between love and work. Nor would Verochka, as Vladimir called her, squander any of her professional training, though as it happened her husband would be the direct (and sole) beneficiary of that expertise.

Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity.

It is a dangerous thing to have the same men in both the prophecy and the history business.

History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, __ut its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them.

Confronted afterward, she claimed no knowledge of that bedroom tryst; she did not intend to be held responsible for men's dreams.

Recently a study proved that working from a larger, less cluttered computer screen increases concentration. I could have told them that. And yes, I write first drafts with a mechanical pencil and a yellow legal pad. There's good reason for this primitive behavior: I am a crackerjack typist. My hand moves far more quickly than my brain.

Life-writing calls for any number of dubious gifts: A touch of O.C.D., a lack of imagination, a large desk, neutrality of Swiss proportions, tactlessness, a high tolerance for archival dust. Most of all it calls for an act of displacement. 'To find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way,' is Richard Holmes's version.

I went out to the desert where Cleopatra camped out with her mercenary army. It's a desolate outpost. Nothing has changed since her day. You realize how far she had to travel. Not only is it a good 150 miles against the current, you can't take a ship.

When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, 'Oh, that's okay. That's not a real book.'

Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.

For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman's intelligence was a man's deception.

Salem is in part a story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers.

Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which would give New England its gritty flavor and, it has been argued, America its independence.