Word: sir
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...Sir Ian McKellan, who originated the role of Max 20 years ago in the stage premier of Bent that won him an Olivier, is luminous in a later cameo as Max's Uncle Freddie. Freddie is a "fluff" like Max, but he's one who has chosen to play it safe by repressing his desires. And, fortunately, several of the play's most powerfully written moments have translated well to film. Especially remarkable is a pivotal scene in Dachau in which Max and Horst, forbidden to touch and kept under the ever-vigilant eye of their guard, make love...
...DIED. SIR ISAIAH BERLIN, 88, British historian-philosopher of awesome erudition; in Oxford, England. The son of a Jewish timber merchant, Berlin became one of Oxford University's most eminent thinkers. His essays still dazzle, whether ruminating on determinism in Historical Inevitability, updating Mill in Two Concepts of Liberty or exploring Tolstoy's conflicted nature in The Hedgehog and the Fox. (See eulogy, below...
Spending time in the presence of Sir Isaiah Berlin was daunting for several reasons. Here was a man who was known and admired by a Who's Who of the 20th century: Einstein, Freud, Picasso, Churchill, Nehru. And then there was his conversation, which tumbled forth with amazing rapidity--he was once clocked at 400 words a minute--all of it gargled through the remaining traces of his childhood Latvian. When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan proposed Berlin for knighthood in 1957, the PM suggested that the honor might be deserved "for talking...
Fortunately, Sir Isaiah in print was more comprehensible than in person. Although the Oxford philosopher was casual about his writings--he never attempted a major book--his lectures and scholarly papers, including Russian Thinkers and Against the Current, established Berlin's reputation as a formidably learned defender of liberal values. His most famous and influential essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), divided humankind into those who have one big idea and those who have many smaller ones. Berlin's hedgehogs included Plato and Dante; among the foxes he named Aristotle and Shakespeare. Although too modest to make such...
...Fortier said he wants more than anything to be released from prison so he can rejoin his family. Tigar responded: "And you're a man who would lie just to have a gun, aren't you, sir?" Fortier responded: "I did do that...