The Menuhin family

So here's a thing, or rather a number of things.

Yehudi Menuhin (you know the guy - good at the fiddle, played for survivors of Belsen, first Jewish person to play under Wilhelm Furtwängler after the War as an act of reconciliation) was married twice. 

His first wife was Nola Nicholas, who was the sister of Hephzibah Menuhin (Yehudi's sister)'s husband Lindsay Nicholas. So far so neat: family parties were presumably easy to arrange and everyone knew where they were going for Christmas.

Unfortunately, neither of the Menuhin-Nicholas marriages lasted. Yehudi married again, this time to Diana Gould. (The Yehudi Menuhins then lived at the house in Highgate later owned by Sting. Insert your own joke here.) Here's the first thing: the two sons of the Menuhin-Gould marriage were called Gerard and Jeremy. That's a bold naming strategy. Presumably neither of them was allowed be called "Gerry" or "Jerry".

(Yehudi's children of his first marriage were called Krov and Zamira. I wonder whether he deferred to his wives in the naming decisions, or at least to Diana.)

Gerard was showered with all the advantages that life can afford: he attended Eton and ... Stanford. Again, that seems like an odd combination: googling the phrase "Eton and Stanford" seems to bring up more results in which the "eton" comes from a line break in "Princeton" than from the English school. 

Anyway, the upshot of all of that family background and first-class education was that Gerard became a noted Holocaust denier. Yes, that's what I said. 

Being a noted Holocaust denier led to him having to leave the Yehudi Menuhin Foundation (YMF). "Apart from a few curious comments about America, we weren’t really aware of his politics", Winfried Kneip, YMF's chief executive, apparently said. America?

And Gerard, in another bold naming decision, called his son Maxwell Menuhin. 

I know that all of this sounds only borderline credible. My only source for any of it is Wikipedia (see here and follow the links), but truth is stranger than fiction and all the rest of it.