Word: emperor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...centuries the Greek Orthodox monastery of Saint Catherine has stood serene and safe beneath the shoulder of Mount Sinai. Founded in 527 by the Emperor Justinian, it is in one of the world's most inhospitable places. A traveler must drive 100 miles southeast from Suez across jagged wilderness, then turn off along a succession of dry stream beds for an eight-hour climb to the gates, 5,000 feet above the Red Sea. Its one tiny door swings open only for men bearing letters of introduction from the Greek Archbishop of Cairo...
...site of Mount Sinai at the confluence of contending religions was responsible for the fact that the monastery contains nearly all the icons which survive from before the 8th century. In 726, the Emperor Leo the Isaurian ordered all icons within the Byzantine realm destroyed to discourage idolatry. Only those at Mount Sinai escaped, since the monastery had fallen under Omayyad rule. The Moslems left the monastery in peace; in return, the monks allowed the Moslems to build a mosque within the monastery...
...belongs to that growing family of ex-colonial heroes who have their feet firmly planted in the muck of local tradition and their heads lifted to the sweet smell of Western excess. But where such literary antecedents as E.M. Forster's Dr. Aziz and Evelyn Waugh's Emperor Seth burned with a hard heathen shame, Ganesh shoulders the white-collar burden with the happy ease of a born...
Strange Household. When Author Wolfe, newly out of Yale, first encountered him in January 1937, Trotsky had just joined Mexico's impressive gallery of grotesques, and later did, in fact, figure in Mexico City's waxworks museum (wearing tweed knickerbockers), along with Emperor Maximilian and Mahatma Gandhi. Author Wolfe's version of Trotsky is itself a kind of waxworks figure (the writing sounds as if Ernest Hemingway were trying to parody Gromyko), but the book has the great merit of pointing to Trotsky's moral dilemma: Would he have used power less ruthlessly than Stalin...
...fourth century Emperor Constantine built the first basilica of St. Peter's on the site of his supposed tomb in an ancient cemetery, and in the present 16th century basilica, the tomb of Peter traditionally lies beneath the Altar of the Confession (reserved to the Pope himself). Over the past 20 years, careful digging has uncovered a number of Christian tombs beneath the altar, with the strong probability that one of them was Peter's; but there was no name or sign to mark it-only a maze of graffiti, scratchings of names, initials and symbols...