Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...announcing that the government would remain in steaming Rio during this year's hot season (mid-December through mid-March) instead of moving to the 26-mile-distant city of Petropolis, up in the cool mountains, as Brazilian chiefs of state have done since the days of Emperor (1822-31) Pedro I. "This government has no time for a vacation," Café Filho explained...
...historical novels as a Roman bust with Marilyn Monroe's. The novel deals with the turbulent second century, but French Author Yourcenar shuns sex and sadism, keeps the defenseless slave maidens in the background and the Saturnalia under control. She allows the sick and aging Emperor Hadrian, ruler of the Western world, to tell his own story in a letter to his 17-year-old adopted grandson, Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian enjoys a good orgy from time to time as much as the next Roman, and he practices the empire's fashionable perversions. But he is far more deeply...
...young soldier he has courage, stamina and ambition. He admits: "I desired the supreme power ... to become my full self before I died." As emperor he proves ruthless and gifted, fighting the imperial wars, defending the Roman peace, reorganizing Britain and the Rhine frontier. Above all, the book shows how the soldier-monarch, despite his successes in holding together the large, unwieldy empire, turns inward and becomes more and more the scholarly stoic, meditating on history, immortality and death. His last words are: "Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes...
...plot concerns a so-called "Collateral Campaign" to celebrate the Austro-Hungarian Emperor's 70th jubilee. The campaign grinds along like a slow bus to nowhere. Committees beget committees, pressure groups stall each other in what one critic described as the dance of rainmakers who have lost their magic. The ruling class sketched by Author Musil has lost not only its magic, but its faith in God, its fear of the Devil and its confidence in itself. It has opinions but no convictions, techniques but no principles, ideals but no beliefs. In short, its troubles may be more timely...
LOST SPLENDOR, by Prince Felix Youssoupoff (307 pp.; Putnam; $4.50), offers the memoirs of the scion of one of Rus sia's great feudal families. Prince Youssoupoff's great-grandmother was Emperor Nicholas I's mistress, and his great-greatgrandfather was a lover of Catherine the Great. The old rake was so rich he had a private theater and ballet, and so dissolute that when he waved his cane all dancers appeared on stage stark naked. Young Prince Felix married a niece of the Czar, vowed he would save the 300-year-old Romanoff dynasty by assassinating...