Philip Freund
Posted at 8:13AM Monday 17 Mar 2008
Philip Freund asked in a poem called At Twenty-Five: "For how many years am I to be grateful?" He had another 73, and, affronted by the idea of retirement, published, at 96, a penultimate book. No slim volume, its 900 large pages brought his history of world theatre to the Renaissance. Never daunted, he ranged from short stories to a 1,000-page novel, The Volcano God (1956-58), set in and around the British Museum reading room. Such was the appetite of Freund, who has died aged 98, for myth and history that the novel's cranky, sometimes astute characters (including one based on Virginia Woolf) each talk for pages on everything under that dome.
Obituary in The Guardian
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