Word: abyssinia
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Hemingway used the war to soak up material for his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Earlier in Abyssinia, Evelyn Waugh witnessed Mussolini's campaign against Haile Selassie's antiquated army. Waugh too was no shakes as a journalist-filing his copy in Latin did not ingratiate him with his editors-but he returned from Africa to disguise his experiences in Scoop, still the best satire on journalism ever written...
...crisis may not be quite "a watershed in human affairs," as Adlai Stevenson calls it, but the whole U.N. experiment has come close to collapse. There are uncomfortable parallels with the disintegration of the League in the 1930s: failure to stop aggression (then it was the Italian attack on Abyssinia), withdrawal by members (then Japan and Nazi Germany). Is the U.N. also falling apart? Should the U.S., the U.N.'s most ardent and generous backer, continue to support it? And just what is there left to support...
...Abyssinia. He was indeed a nuisance, even to the men who hired his skill. From Lord Beaverbrook, for whom he went to work in 1927, Low exacted the promise that he could draw whatever he chose. That choice was rarely to the proprietor's Tory tastes; Low's brushwork punctured the Conservative Party, the Beaver's dreams of British Empire, and the Beaver himself. Low once depicted his boss as a witch on a broomstick, preaching "politics for child minds." When Beaverbrook urged his staff to go light on Mussolini's rape of Abyssinia, Low impudently...
Laval's chain was never totally forged, in part because the British helped drive Mussolini into Hitler's arms during the Abyssinia crisis, in part because disputatious Deputies back in Paris sabotaged his efforts. Laval never forgave either. Ironically, France's No. 1 traitor-to-be fell into views that precisely paralleled those of hero-to-be De Gaulle. He despised the French Parliament, thought France needed a new constitution, and was convinced that he alone could bring all this about...
...Best of Enemies. War is hellarious. That is the motto of this picture, and it tries, with fair success, to live up to it. Two army detachments, one Italian, one English, operating in Abyssinia in early 1941 became involved in one long military comedy of errors in which they do practically everything but fight...