Geoffrey Hawthorn writes:

Grafton is too sensitive to the great variety of what he has unearthed, and has too fine a feel for circumstance and the ragged nature of intellectual life, to give any simple account of how the end came about. But the elements are as evident in Grafton’s three principal players as they are in Jean le Clerc, the late 17th-century editor and man of letters whose cauterising ars critica he describes in his first chapter, as well as in the host of writers he collects in his last, on ‘the death of a genre’. It was becoming increasingly difficult to resist suggestions that what the ancient authors wrote – they had always been valued more for their rhetoric than their facts – may not always have been true. Even where it might have been, it was increasingly difficult to deny that the more closely one considered ancient circumstances and purposes, the less easy it was to see what they offered to one’s own.

(LRB 20 November 2008)

Cambridge | paperback 319 pp. |ISBN: 9780521697149