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The Benefits of Doubt by Frederic Raphael is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Benefits of Doubt about?

In Frederic Raphael's essays we meet familiar faces, known names, but the way he reintroduces them to us, with a ruthless clarity which seeks to conceal nothing, make us revalue them. Doubt is what keeps us from the tyranny of bien pensant sentimentalism, from accepting the nostrums of a journalised and televisualised culture. The first man we meet in The Benefit of Doubt is a tutelary spirit of Raphael's world, Primo Levi, a champion in the unequal fight between civilization and barbarism in which every thinking person is to some extent engaged. Other essays pursue Aristotle, Surrealism, Gore Vidal, cultural criticism, Heidegger, biography, the emperor Hadrian, translation, Arthur Koestler, the Jews, David Storey, the Greeks, Schnitzler, Tom Cruise, Disney and Kubrick amongst other subjects. On the Greeks... ...The Greeks had a long reputation for turning spitefully on those whom they earlier blessed with fame. Even Themistocles (a dodgy character before he became the hero of Salamis) ended his life working as a civil servant for the Persians whom he had defeated. Few good deeds went unpunished in a society riven by envy, toadyism, malice and libellous recklessness on the part, fo

Author

Frederic Raphael

Publisher

Carcanet Press Ltd.

Published

2003

Language

EN

ISBN

9781857546354

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Poetry, Humanities