Word: nom
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...into print, London critics hooted happily that the model for the talkative detective was obviously brilliant, pudgy Sir Isaiah Berlin, Oxford don, author (The Hedgehog and the Fox), cross-country conversationalist and, during World War II, a first secretary at the British embassy in Washington. Jocelyn Davey was a nom de plume, and there seemed good reason to suspect that Sir Isaiah might be Author Davey, as well as Hero Usher. To save a fellow Reform Club member from disrepute, the real author stepped forward: brilliant, pudgy Chaim ("Rab") Raphael, who was at Oxford with Sir Isaiah, lectured there...
Marquand admitted that his early years as a professional writer were a difficult period. "When my publisher first read the manuscript of The Late George Apley," he related, "he turned pale and suggested that it be written under a nom de plume...
While some staffers thought the pun too corny and the sentence open to literal interpretation by the fast reader, none questioned the propriety of printing it. For the punster, betrayed by his nom de plume, was none other than the Times's Publisher and Board Chairman Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who frequently writes a quiet little letter to the editor...
World War II: Mobilized as medical aide, seriously wounded and taken prisoner (in German prison he completed writing a textbook on English Grammar and pronunciation), later was returned to Arras in prisoner exchange. Joined resistance, worked for four years in network called Libre-Nord under nom de guerre Laboule; three times arrested by Gestapo who failed to break him, last time released when condemned friend (executed next day) refused to identify him as-Laboule...
Hypnos was a nom de guerre before it became a nom de plume. Rene Char, a combat artilleryman in the defeated French armies of 1940, took to the hills above his village. There, as Hypnos, he led a band of guerrillas so bravely that later he received a commendation from General Eisenhower. His simple patriotism that puts country above home and family is expressed in one of his aphorisms: "Be married and not married to your house," which expresses what 17th century Cavalier Poet Richard Lovelace said more fancifully: "I could not love thee, dear, so much...