Adam Gopnik, in the new New Yorker, in a review of Stephen Greenblatt’s new biography of Shakespeare:

Whatever our official pieties, deep down we still believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life.

yep.