Word: bab
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...Bab Ballads...
Some of William Schwenck Gilbert's own infancy must have gone into this carefree jingle. Aged two (and known to his doting parents as "Bab"), Gilbert was being wheeled in his pram along an Italian country road when the local bandits appeared on the scene. They tipped their hats to the nursemaid, suavely persuaded her that they had been sent by father Gilbert to fetch his son, and disappeared into the mountains with Bab (in later life, Gilbert insisted that he remembered the scenery as being very fine). The bandits demanded, and promptly received, a ransom...
Today, most citizens of the English-speaking world would feel that Bab was cheap at the price. They might also feel that without this firsthand experience of Italian opera bouffe at an impressionable age, Gilbert would never have furnished his famed librettos* with some of their most striking characteristics, e.g., the plausible ruffians and harried nursemaids, the wacky plots that hinge on babies stolen and strayed, the identities lost in enigmas and found through...
Masters of Mayhem. Bab Gilbert grew up in that peculiarly Victorian period which saw the rise of the limerick, the nonsense-rhyme, the deadpan fantasy, the whimsical fairytale, the gay and dexterous verse-strummings on themes of mayhem, decapitation, kidnaping, cannibalism-an era that began with Thackeray, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Gilbert himself, and was carried on into the 20th Century by James Barrie, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Evelyn Waugh...
Their strategic position at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, flanking Suez, the Red Sea and Bab el Mandeb gave the Arab possessors of Asia's oil lands an importance beyond their numerical or political strength. India's position in Asia and in the British Empire made the Indian question not only Britain's but the world's problem...