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As a stoker, stylist and lateral thinker, Hugo Brandt Corstius dominated the public debate in the Netherlands like no other for half a century. He elevated the raging ad hominem to an art form. What is the legacy of the HBC method in 2024? Under the names Piet Grijs, Battus, Stoker, Maaike Helder, Jan Eter and dozens of other pseudonyms, Hugo Brandt Corstius got the authorities on their nerves in all the media that mattered. In her biography of Brandt Corstius, Elsbeth Etty investigates what drove this feared polemicist, humorist and explorer of Upperland language and literature. About Public Intellectuals:In Public Intellectuals we ask contemporary writers to write a new essay on the work of a twentieth-century writer.