Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Reviewlet: Raphael on Josephus

MACLEANS: Review: A Jew Among Romans: The Life and Legacy of Flavius Josephus (Brian Bethune). Excerpt:
But in the multitalented and prickly [Frederic] Raphael—novelist, classicist and Oscar-winning screenwriter for Darling (1965)—the ancient survivor has found his ideal judge, a man as certain of being a Jew as he is uncertain of the meaning of that fact, much as Josephus himself was. (“There is comedy of a kind,” the 81-year-old Raphael writes, “that the only people who might now insist that I am not really a Jew—since I neither pray nor abstain from forbidden foods—are other Jews.”)