The Gate of Heaven, his major work, circulated in Amsterdam in Spanish and appeared in a Hebrew abridgement in 1655.
The narration and the insights into fraught relationships are engaging, but something seems to have been lost in the abridgement.
The son of an Anglican minister, Olivier attended All Saints Choir School, where at age nine he made his theatrical debut as Brutus in an abridgement of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
These compositions of Mukhtasar do not simply reproduce the legal rulings of eponyms of schools of law in an abridgement as traditionally it has been understood.
I'd tried to match that plainness in my abridgement, helped by the knowledge that it would immediately be translated into Italian: you tend to keep verbal ornaments to a minimum when you know that what you're writing is not going to be read in the original language.
It's written at a middle-school reading level, and although Sullivan is clear enough about the contours of the most troubling and least successful Presidencies in history, the abridgement naturally works in their favor nonetheless.
His interest in primary documents is also shown in his recent abridgement of Bernal Diaz del Castillo's The History of the Conquest of New Spain.
In his 1961 abridgement, John Tyler Bonner wrote that Chapter IX "On the theory of transformations, or the comparison of related forms" is "the most celebrated chapter".
"My Past and Thoughts" embraces a wide range of moods and emotional registers, from the poignant lyricism of the chapters on childhood to the anguished, self-lacerating examination of the Herwegh affair (not included in the Macdonald abridgement).
The first years of retirement saw a flurry of work, from a translation and abridgement (in partnership with his wife) of Alexandre Dumas' encyclopedia of food - Dumas On Food (1978), to the publication of his North Atlantic Seafood (1979), to putting in place, in 1978, a deal with Oxford University Press to commence his magnum opus, The Oxford Companion To Food, not to see the light until 1999.
