To take on a subject that has been extensively written about requires a degree of both daring and ambition in an author. When I started to read The Many Lives of Anne Frank by Ruth Franklin, I thought there was little that I didn’t know about Anne and her circumstances. I had read her world-famous diary (eventually published in more than 75 translations), of course, and had tried to emulate it by starting my own diary. (This exercise lasted all of a week.) I had also visited the secret annex in Amsterdam at Prinsengracht 263 and been astonished by the restricted space, hidden by a bookcase, in which eight people had managed to conduct their daily lives for two years, from 1942 to 1944, in relative civility.
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