Word: abyssinia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wilfred Thesiger was born in June 1910 in a mud building in Addis Ababa. His father was the British Minister to Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), and his mother, an Irish beauty, seems to have had a knack for prophetic understatement. "My mother," says Thesiger early in this autobiography, "always maintained that the first words I said were 'Go yay,' which meant 'Go away...
...future vagabond and his brother were sent to boarding school in England where, he recalls, "as English boys who had barely heard of cricket we were natural targets." Classmates branded him a liar when he told them of warriors and lion hunts. Rejected, he withdrew into primal memories of Abyssinia...
...late father's, invited him to attend his coronation. The feudal pageantry of the occasion has been described with condescending vividness by Evelyn Waugh, then a correspondent for Fleet Street. By contrast, Thesiger notes sadly that during his absence of eleven years "the age-old splendour of Abyssinia" had been fading. The Emperor's bodyguard wore khaki; the palace secretaries were in tailcoats. Thesiger met the celebrated author of Vile Bodies and found him foppish and petulant. He refused Waugh's request to accompany him on an expedition among the touchy Danakil. "Had he come," he adds menacingly, "I suspect...
From the moment the curtain rose last night on the Theatricals's 138th annual production, "Between the Sheiks," the audience easily forgot the offstage drama surrounding their Man of the Year, and happily warmed to the hot desert sun of Solong, Abyssinia...
...late. For Ahab is plotting with his free-market cohorts, the sultan is distracted, and the profit motive looms large in Abyssinia. At the end of the first act (which runs for a marathon 90 minutes), cliff-hanging questions remain: will capitalism turn the sandy Solong into an OPEC nightmare? Will the big-hearted Celia Lips be able to stop the evil Ahab and his mercenary fling, the Countess? Will the Sultan ever discover his own hormones? And will the overfed Ethel land a job with the Chicago defense...