In the late 1960s identical twins Jean-Pierre and Jean-Paul Kessel were catapulted to minor stardom as juvenile ping-pong prodigies, alternating their conventional doubles prowess with trick acrobatic exhibitions that confirmed their uncanny mastery of the medium. Their interest in the game was awakened at the age of eight in the course of an English lesson delivered by Jeremy Booth-Clifford, at the time a bohemian student of international law supplementing his meagre scholarship money by giving private language lessons, but later to become one of London’s most prominent and certainly most flamboyant barristers, despite having been tragically blinded after staring at the sun while acid-tripping at Stonehenge in 1971. (more…)