"Born in Massachusetts in the year of Andrew Johnson's impeachment and dead ninety-five years later in the year of Lyndon Johnson's installation, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois cut an amazing swath through four continents (he was a Lenin Peac Prize laureate and his birthday was once a national holiday in China), writing sixteen pioneering or provocative books of sociology, history, politics and race relations. In his eighties he found time to finish a second autobiography and produce three large historical novels, complementing the two large works of fiction he wrote in the first two decades of the twentieth century." Chapter 3, page 3

"Gnawing suspicions (possibly even a few hard facts) about the reasons for his father's disappearance led him to cling to paternal mythology - to gild Alfred's portrait - and to blame Mary Silvina for removing him from their lives. After all, it was she who had acquiesced...