"Rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread and meat would go into the hoppers together," Sinclair wrote, in one of his many vivid passages based on his research in Chicago, and he added, "There were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit".
This would explain countless passages based on the lives, or quoted from the writings, of Woolf and her husband, Leonard.
In a series of letters to the poet Debora Vogel, he composed elaborate postscripts long, descriptive passages based on episodes from his childhood.
Some cuts, with six new passages based on Handel's original sketches "constructed" by the head of music, Derek Clark, will startle purists but resulted in a clear telling of one of the composer's most immediate and, finally, joyful operas.
What we miss (except in passages based on a trove of Elizabeth's letters) is the triangulation of distance and a second voice: the snail trail along which the biographer struggles to patch what is missing and to reckon at what she cannot know.
In the eighth and ninth centuries, more than a century after the death of Muhammad, Islamic commentators added diacritical marks to clear up the ambiguities of the text, giving precise meanings to passages based on what they considered to be their proper context.
