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'As with so many things young John Keats wrote, his description of the innermost psyche as 'an internal spangly gloom' is the finest we may get In this region you will spend one or more years if you decide to write your autobiography. By autobiography I mean what the dictionary means—the written history of the life of some person. I want to be clear about this because the word, from publishers' point of view, has become imprecise and gaseous. The string of anecdotes, the axe-grinding exercise, the regrettable whinge motivated by revenge—these will certainly sell if' written by a sufficiently famous or powerful individual. For we arc insatiably nosy about others' private lives. Horses and chimps don't appear to care in the least, so for us this striking inquisitiveness is probably a learning process, and so has evolutionary value.' (Introduction)
