Blood relatives

The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at Oxford to learn about classical tragedy.

The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at Oxford to learn about classical tragedy.

It is unusual, as Benazir’s niece Fatima points out in Songs of Blood and Sword, for a Bhutto to die a natural death. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father and Fatima’s grandfather, had been at Christ Church (Benazir was at LMH and Catz), and had recently been denied an honorary doctorate, having supposedly burnt down a university.