Word: ludo
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...friends knew him as Ludo, which means "I play" in Latin. But there was little playful about Ludovic Kennedy, a broadcaster and writer of high seriousness, who died Oct. 18 at 89. A Briton of aristocratic lineage, Kennedy was an advocate of foxhunting and showed something of that merciless instinct in his investigative journalism, which he devoted to exposing miscarriages of justice. His book 10 Rillington Place inspired the posthumous pardon of Timothy Evans, a young Englishman wrongly executed for murder in 1950, and hastened Britain's abolition of the death penalty. The Airman and the Carpenter, Kennedy's exploration...
...love of the water" and an "insane" competitive streak ("I was playing Ludo with my niece the other day and I couldn't handle her beating me") keep her motivated. But the real quest, Kendall says - the true source of her sailing passion - "is getting into that mind space that creates the energy which makes you incredibly powerful when you race - that's the third dimension of competition." Partly, she says, it's about rediscovering her youth, when performing was based on intuition, instinct and feeling. Experience eats away at those forces, the confidence goes, bad thoughts fill...
Sibylla is a single mother in London with a surplus of brains but a deficit of funds and support. Her son Ludo--the result of a one-night stand with a man Sibylla calls Liberace on account of his mawkish mediocrity--is some kind of insatiable genius; the minute he learns one thing, he gobbles up the next. "I taught him to count past 5 and he counted up to 5,557 over a period of three days before collapsing in sobs because he had not reached the end...I taught him to add 2 to a number...
...winter, to escape their unheated flat, they ride the Circle Line all day long, Ludo's stroller laden with books--these would include The Odyssey in Greek, some Japanese primers and The House at Pooh Corner. The pair are happy to sit and study; for Sibylla, the hardship comes with the stream of comments from other passengers astonished to see a child reading Greek. "Faced with officious advice feel almost overwhelming temptation to say:...'I know, I'll take the Tube, somebody on the Tube will be able to advise me...Thank you so much,'" Sibylla notes...
These early scenes with Sibylla and Ludo provide comic relief in an otherwise haunting, melancholy work. The novel is almost free form, with shifting narrative voices and scholarly digressions on whatever happens to fascinate Sibylla or Ludo at any given moment. Enveloped in their cocoon of lonely eccentricity, mother and son watch Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai over and over, and fragments from the film float through the novel like a refrain in a minor key. Eventually, Ludo begins a quest of his own, not to recruit samurai but to track down a father, any father. "I felt ashamed, really...