Benefits of Doubt
Essays
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.
About the Author
Frederic Raphael was born in Chicago in 1931 and educated at Charterhouse and St John's College, Cambridge. His novels include "The Glittering Prizes" (1976), "A Double Life" (1993), "Coast to Coast" (1998) and "Fame and Fortune" (2007); he has also written short stories and biographies of Somerset Maugham and Byron. Frederic Raphael is a leading screenwriter, whose work includes the Academy Award-winning "Darling" (1965), "Two for the Road" (1967), Far from the "Madding Crowd" (1967), and the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's last film, "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999). The first volume of "Personal Terms" was published by Carcanet in 2001, with subsequent volumes in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2013.
