Just how creative can [should?] a biographer be? When creating a life for someone creative? Lefkowitz importantly stresses just how hard [impossible] it is, and ever was, to write out getting into a position to think, imagine, produce, realize, and deliver into the public domain any piece of work – creatively. If these essays could only tell their tales …

To set a writing life within a persuasively formative frame must always be the approximate, suggestive, abyssal business of reading into the grain of the person that Lampe characterizes as the adynaton of biography – working always with and against the formulae, topoi, traditions that always shape the modes of intelligibility that style persons within the cultures involved (both parties in the deal) – but also privilege persons attributed with a special ‘gift’ with their extraordinariness, and its starring weirdness, blessedness, mystico-mythical aura and definitive otherness, including unseizably enigmatic unruliness. Elaborate stories of the trials of error, repetitive workshop grind, aching bodies, crappy tools and out of tune instruments can deploy in picturing creativity, but apprentices, factory, patronage and self-promo eventing … – this is unlikely to catch imaginative genius in a portrait likely to come across as itself an imagination glittering on the page.

What must count as the volume's thrust is the aetiological task set by the creations. How come the ancient sculpture and painting fraternity managed to leave us no portraiture of themselves? Platt starkly documents both craving for authorship at work here and its frustration by the ancient abjection of these manual hirelings. Contrast with LeVen's attuned enthusiasm for the ever-immaculate purity of the imaginary song-and-dance man Orpheus, focus and model for all bearers of the recreative and recreating powers of musical beauty and pleasure on down the line of biographeme rips and remixes (including Low's sainted Archilochus on Paros). Stick to the pride of Litterae Humaniores, and read authority through the performed, recounted, figured antics embodied in the classic texts and referred to their embedding authors: Uhlig's incipiently (auto)biographizing Pindaric post-Homers; Laird and his team of Virgil-orchestrators envisioning their author hidden all across the work in his works.