Biography has always had a reputation problem. In the 19th century the genre was worthy but dull, typically extending to two huge volumes written by some ‘keeper of the flame’, frequently a son, sometimes a widow, always a fawner. Then along came the great disruptors, Virginia Woolf and her friend Lytton Strachey, who blasted the genre apart, revealing its essentially provisional nature. Nonetheless, predictions of biography’s death have turned out to be vastly exaggerated, not least because readers in the 21st century continue to love biographies, and buy them still. This is despite more recent carping from the likes of the American critic Janet Malcolm in the 1990s, who famously skewered the whole biographical enterprise as nothing more than posh gossip.

So, for an academic and intellectual as eminent as Clare Carlisle – she is professor of philosophy at King’s College London – to tackle the topic of what biography is for and what it can be feels remarkable and turns out to be thrilling. Having published widely on Spinoza and Kierkegaard, Carlisle is interested in exploring the way in which transcendence – that ineffable state of rising above the quotidian world – may be achieved, at least momentarily, by attending to the lives of others. She is not, to be clear, suggesting that we go back to the days of Victorian hagiography and look up the lives of the great and the good in order to emulate their furious self-willing. Nor are we to search the autobiographies of rackety soap stars just so that we can thank the heavens that we never took cocaine in the 1990s. Rather, Carlisle is suggesting that in the very act of contemplating and recording another person’s life we might achieve a viewpoint from which we can better understand and value our own and, indeed, life itself.

This is subtle stuff. One of Carlisle’s great skills in these essays, which started life as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, is the way she anchors her sophisticated arguments in anecdotes and case histories that non-philosophers can understand. She returns, for example, to George Eliot, on whom she has previously written