'This can hardly be too vehemently recommended'

 Back in the days when the late Sage of Tiverton and I were exchanging frequent text messages, he somehow convinced himself that my nightly routine was to retire to bed and read Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. I've no idea where he got this notion, as I had never read the much praised Memoirs, but it was a book I had long intended to get round to reading one day. This state of affairs continued until very recently when, spotting it on the shelves of my favourite charity bookshop, I nerved myself to buy it and – yes, at last – read it. I am not sorry: I'd say it is perhaps the best thing of its kind I have read. 
   Published in 1951, after a very long gestation, it is, as the title suggests, an account of his life written in the first person by the Emperor Hadrian (who is remembered today chiefly for his wall, his love of Antinous, and his poetical farewell to his soul, 'Animula vagula blandula...'). His death drawing near, Hadrian sets out his memoir in the form of a long letter to his grandson Marcus Aurelius (of the ever popular Meditations), who will in due course succeed him. Yourcenar's endeavour was inspired by a sentence she came across in Flaubert's correspondence: 'Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.' It's a questionable statement (Christ had been around a good while by the time of Marcus Aurelius, and the old gods had gone nowhere), but the idea is strong, even intoxicating, and it spurred the young Yourcenar to write the first of many versions of her Hadrian. These she mostly destroyed, retaining just one eloquent sentence: 'I begin to discern the profile of my death'. With this sentence, she wrote later, 'I had at last found a point from which to view the book'. 
   The dying Hadrian is an entirely convincing figure, and the world he inhabits, both outer and inner, has the ring of authenticity. Yourcenar devoted years to research, but her approach is not that of the encyclopaedically inclined Flaubert, who liked to throw in everything including the kitchen sink – has anyone ever read Salammbo a second time for pleasure? She had created the whole of Hadrian's world in her head, and all she had to do was place him in it (in this she resembled Penelope Fitzgerald in her later novels). Because the book is, of course, written in the first person, no explanation, no wider view, is needed. You are in Hadrian's world, his empire, his philosophy, his career, his struggles and triumphs, loves and losses, enemies and lovers, memories and (few) regrets, as he surveys his past, assesses his present and prepares, with Stoic calm, to leave the world. Written in an elegant and balanced (indeed classical) prose, Memoirs of Hadrian is an astonishing feat of historical imagination on Yourcenar's part. When it came out, it received rave reviews, one of which – by Raymond Mortimer in the Sunday Times – is quoted on the back of my (Penguin) edition: 'As a picture of the whole various Empire with its manners and beliefs, no less than as an imaginary portrait of its ruler, this can hardly be too vehemently recommended.' They don't write them like that any more, but he's right, and I am so glad I finally got round to it.