This AP photo appeared in today’s New York Times next to a story about the end of the BBC’s short­wave ser­vice. It caught my eye not because the man seated at the micro­phone is John Dos Passos—I would have never known it was him with­out the caption—but because of the poster that hangs over his shoul­der, which reads “be like dad, Keep Mum!” That poster was part of a WWII cam­paign in Britain against loose talk—you can just make out the tagline run­ning along the poster’s bottom edge, which reads, “Careless Talk Costs Lives.”

If you’ve read the first volume of Javier Marías’s excel­lent Your Face Tomor­row, you might remem­ber the Keep Mum poster; it’s one of many from the cam­paign that is repro­duced in the novel’s pages (this one shows up on page 320). If you haven’t, here’s some of what Peter Wheeler, one of the book’s char­ac­ters, has to say about it:
[Read more]

Javier Marías, the author of Your Face Tomor­row, is also the ruler of the Kind­gom of Redonda, which occu­pies a one-square-mile island in the Caribbean Ocean. What fol­lows is a list of the dukes and duchesses that Marías has named since assum­ing the crown in 1997. (A full list of the Redon­dan peer­age may be found here.)

Pedro Almodóvar, Duke of Trémula (1999)
António Lobo Antunes, Duke of Coco­dri­los (2001)
John Ash­bery, Duke of Con­vexo (1999)
Antony Beevor, Duke of Stal­in­grado (2006)
Pierre Bour­dieu, Duke of Desar­raigo (1999)
William Boyd, Duke of Braz­zav­ille (1999)
Ray Brad­bury, Duke of Diente de León (2006)
Michael Braudeau, Duke of Miranda (2004)
AS Byatt, Duchess of Morpho Euge­nia (1999)
Guillermo Cabr­era Infante, Duke of Tigres (1999)
Pietro Citati, Duke of Remon­stranza (2002)
JM Coet­zee, Duke of Deshonra (2001)
Fran­cis Ford Cop­pola, Duke of Megalópolis(1999)
[Read more]