Her devotees colluded to make her that heroic icon, and she readily played the part.
That's one of the things that heroic tenors do: first they live and then they start singing.
But Vineland reminds you that heroic and unheroic political eras, such as they exist at all, are always intertwined.
Close to the heart of the Romantic ethos was the idea that heroic individuals could attain the freedom to make their own laws, in defiance of society.
Olsen's legacy is considerable, Reid argues, but her life was complex: "Her devotees colluded to make her that heroic icon, and she readily played the part".
Alternative medicine proponents have also latched on to the antioxidant fable, this notion that heroic antioxidant supplements fight sinister free radicals out to wreck havoc on the body.
"That's when I said, 'It's going to do what it's going to do,' " he recalled, adding that heroic work by firefighters had turned the flames back.
The last thing Stalin needed was for it to become known that heroic Soviet soldiers had destroyed one of the Motherland's unique treasures.
In an era when human incursion into the landscape invites trepidation, Karl Haglund's thorough and intriguing Inventing the Charles River arrives to remind us that heroic construction can, in fact, ameliorate it.
It reminded me, somehow, of one of those performances that heroic mothers of dying children are able to summon, bustling about with a chipper air and saying with a smile, "Today, we're going to read a lovely story".
As heroes, these figures aren't all that heroic — Winston Smith is a mid-ranking employee of the Ministry of Truth, in Orwell's "1984"; Bernard Marx, in Huxley's "Brave New World," is self-conscious about his puny body — and purposefully so.
