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Saturday, February 15, 2014

Biographers & Brandy: Directorate S


Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.

Beckett was a misanthrope, Joyce a philanderer, Dickens a tyrant. So why do biographers depict their subjects as especially admirable people? Calling spade a shovel

Bourbon and books, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, Cheever and Carver: In America, literary distinction and alcoholism have long been linked... Brandy Coniac Duality Etc Friendship

fictional-london
“Fiction is the second life of a city and has a profound effect on the way it is experienced by visitors and its inhabitants.”

Monkeys do it, minnows do it, even fiddler crabs do it. Play, that is. And that’s become an intellectual scandal. After all, what's the purpose of play? Thespians at Heart

At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, famous writers taught, gave readings, drank, philandered, and enriched themselves – with help from the CIA. The good old days

Like for Jozef Imrich, for W.G. Sebald, history was a sequence of terrible events. Everywhere they looked they saw an abyss. Coldest Realities of Life and Death

A FORMER KGB agent in the Soviet era has escaped a drink-drive charge in New Zealand so he can continue his work as a consultant to foreign intelligence agencies. New Zealand-based Mr Kouzminov was described in court as a member of a secret nuclear biological and chemical warfare society with a high-level security clearance.
Before arriving in New Zealand from Russia with his wife and two children in 1994, Mr Kouzminov reportedly worked for a top secret cell within the KGB known as “Directorate S”.Vodka stands for little Water





Judge David Burns said Kouzminov’s breath alcohol reading was “very high” but said “the spectacular fall from grace” of losing his work would be too high a price to pay, the Sunday Herald reported.