To make [Hadrian in "The Memoirs of Hadrian"] explain himself, as Marguerite Yourcenar has done, by composing the sort of self-analytical autobiography he might have written is admittedly "a tour de force of scholarship."…

As a work of art, of psychological insight, of historical intuition, the "Memoirs of Hadrian" is an extraordinarily expert performance…. It has a quality of authenticity, of verisimilitude, that delights and fascinates. Hadrian's recollections—of riding and hunting, of the weight of a shield, of secret intrigues, of mystic elation under desert stars—induce a startling conviction of veracity and authority.

His studied detachment, his sense of singularity, his sensitivity to works of poetry and art are equally well suggested. They blended with that admiration for beautiful boys into which his starved emotions tricked him, an abnormality he sought to extenuate with the assertion that "every pleasure enjoyed with art seemed to me chaste...