Mahon

Mahón , Catalan Maó, town (1990 pop. 24,383), capital and chief town of Minorca island, Baleares prov., Spain, in the W Mediterranean Sea. A port with an excellent natural harbor defended by two fortresses, it is also an important air and naval base. Mahón was named for the Carthaginian general Mago. It shared the history of Minorca .

Mahone, William məˈhōn (1826–95) Confederate army officer, born in Monroe, Virginia. Mahone achieved his greatest fame in the fighting around Petersburg (1864), when, at the Battle of the Crater, he led the counterattack that restored a badly broken Confederate line, earning the praise of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Previously Mahone had taken part in the battle of Seven Pines and the Seven Days' battles (1862), as well as First Bull Run (1861) (at which he was wounded), Fredericksburg (1862), and Chancellorsville (1863).

Mahon, Derek (1941– ), poet, born in Belfast, educated at Trinity College, Dublin. In the 1960s he became associated, together with Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, with the group known as the ‘Northern Poets’. His poetry, often bleak and uncompromising in its portrayal of urban squalor and deprivation, includes Twelve Poems (1965), Night-Crossing (1968), The Snow Party (1975), The Hunt by Night (1982), A Kensington Notebook (1984), and Antarctica (1985). A collected volume, Poems 1962–1975, appeared in 1979, Selected Poems in 1991. He has also translated Molière's School for Wives (1986) and the Bacchae of Euripides (1991).