[Q] You have some pretty extraordinary cousins on both sides?

Yeah. The... the cousin who died on Friday was the widow of Abba Eban, of Aubrey Eban; he was first cousin on my father’s side. And... actually I can give you a little thing I... I wrote about him because... which has to do with the subject of identity and twinning, because on one occasion... when he was in office in Israel I saw very little of him, but after he was dropped by, I think, an increasingly partisan government who couldn’t bear his broad-mindedness, he came to New York more.

And on one occasion we’d both been invited to lunch by a second cousin, and meeting him was very strange because we... we both have the same bulky, clumsy, impulsive form and movements, and somewhat similar styles of speech. And we found ourselves finishing each other’s sentences, and I was very puzzled at this. And I said to him, 'Aubrey, I think we’re closer constitutionally than I am to my three brothers!' And he said that he had a similar feeling with regard to his three siblings, and I said, 'How can this be?' And he said, 'Atavism', and I said, 'What do you mean atavism?' He said 'Atavis is a grandfather', he said his father, Aubrey’s father, had died when he was two years old and he was largely brought up by our grandfather. And he said people used to comment on the uncanny similarity between the old man and the child.

He said there was no one else in the grandparental generation like our grandfather, no one at all in the parental generation, and he had thought no one in his own generation until the door opened and I walked in, when he thought I was his grandfather come to life. I miss him a lot.