Word: barbariane
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...name. In the past this delegation of authority has meant that the Emperor had wealth and power only of mystic sorts. For most of Japan's modern history - from 1185 to 1868 - the real power in Japan was held by military dictators called Sei-i-tai-Shogun ("Barbarian-subduing Generalissimo"). The most astonishing degree of delegation came in the 13th Century, when a titular Emperor's functions as a figurehead were usurped by an abdicated Emperor, while temporal power was supposedly held by a hereditary Shogun, who left actual authority to the Shogun's hereditary adviser...
...Blue," says the Barbarian Britannus in Shaw's Caesar & Cleopatra, "is the color worn by all Britons of good standing. In war we stain our bodies blue; so that though our enemies may strip us of our clothes and our lives, they cannot strip us of our respectability." Though Britons long since ceased painting themselves for battle, they were blue all over last week about their position on the Far Eastern Front of the War of Nerves. The Japanese, having stripped Far Eastern Britons of clothes and Face (Oriental for respectability), moved troops into position along the border...
Lear was a professional expatriate of the Robert Browning-Walter Savage Landor school. Most of his life was spent in Rome, Corfu, San Remo. His travels through Europe, Asia and Africa look like a map of the Barbarian Invasions. He saw Petra before Doughty, was nearly killed there by the Arabs, muddled through with superb British calm. Fanatics tried to assassinate the author of The Owl and the Pussy-Cat in India, in Turkey. At last Lear settled down in his San Remo villa with an Albanian servant and his cat Foss, "his daily companion for nearly 17 years." There...
Much has happened to England since Gibbon wrote, and to Robert Graves the fall of Rome seems a much more complex matter than it did to Gibbon. Nor does he write of it with the majestic smugness that has made Gibbon an unsurpassed soporific for 150 years. The barbarians were really pretty tough. The emperors whom Gibbon dismissed as weaklings were really doing their best; the barbarian generals were smart men-besides, Rome was a hard city to defend. So in Robert Graves's books Rome falls with a sigh rather than with the sonorous crash that Gibbon heard...
...hoping to make it a base for their southerly drive to Hankow, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's provisional capital, the flood was a severe setback. Tokyo papers at once accused the devilish Chinese of having sprung the dikes as a strategic military move. "An atrocity," cried Damei, "by barbarian Chinese. . . . The Japanese are making frantic efforts to check the flow and to rescue the Chinese caught in the flood area, at the same time repulsing Chinese attacks...