Seated in the midst of the gesturing babble that marks lunchtime at the Wits Club, Jonny Steinberg radiates stillness. Dedicated bird-watchers learn to be calm like this, observing minutely while making no movement that might disturb or distract their subjects.

Grecian urns and psychotherapists know this quietness. And so, it seems, do biographer-historians, or at least this one, whose relentless burrowings into the collective unconscious of a country reveal the hidden links that connect people and their actions throughout time...