Much has been written about the therapeutic effects of reading. Carmen Martin Gaite, for example, expressed her views on the subject in 1989. “Reading provides insight into a secret world that ...

‘To be a biographer you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments, hypocrisies,” Freud wrote to Arnold Zweig in 1936. “Biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were to be had, we could not ...