Neil, the narrator, is a middle-aged man who hasn't been doing too well either personally or professionally. If there is something that he remembers with enthusiasm, it is the Culture and Civilization classes that he received from an exceptional teacher: Elizabeth Finch. Intelligent and unattainable, full of elegance, this admirer of the classical world considered that the world had taken the wrong path the day the Roman Empire decided to embrace Christian monotheism. That is why her hero was the last pagan emperor: Julian the Apostate. When he stopped being her student, Neil kept in touch with Elizabeth, and they ate together periodically. Now the admired teacher has died, and her former disciple undertakes a double task: to write an essay on Juliano based on the notes and questions she left behind, and to investigate the biography of that enigmatic woman through the notebooks she has bequeathed to him. Who really was the elusive and fascinating Elizabeth Finch? What mysteries did her personality hide? Where does admiration end and love begin? What can we learn from history and culture? What is it that gives meaning to our lives? Playing once again with genres and their limits, Julian Barnes has written a novel that is also a philosophical musing and a biographical reconstruction through which he pays homage, in a more or less veiled way, to a very dear friend, a deceased English writer.
