Word: niles
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Baffling Travelers. A chronicle in which explorer after explorer vanishes into the jungle necessarily lacks the grand narrative sweep of Alan Moorehead's The White Nile and The Blue Nile. But Sanche de Gramont, an able journalist and popular historian (The French: Portrait of a People), has written a book, covering roughly the years 1790 to the present, with its own ironic fascination. At the outset, as was true of the Nile, no European knew the source of the Niger (in the mountains about 200 miles east of Sierra Leone). Its destination was also unknown. There were even disputes...
...second gear going into the first hairpin turn, yelping at the little mechanical rabbit and jostling for position. It was time to move to a new location, close the shop out, hold a 50 per cent sale. The only pun we could dredge up concerned the cataracts of the Nile, but all the Egyptian suntanned silt fucked up our upstairs wiring...rinse it out, waterfalls, going over the edge of the abyss...
Enraptured Paris. The space is never real. Cornell's L 'Egypte de Mile, Cléo de Mérode, 1940, is not the Egypt seen by Flaubert, detachedly noting the gleam of his white socks at midnight on the Nile. Cornell had never been, or wished to go, to that Egypt. But in his mind the image of Cléo de Mérode, a courtesan who so enraptured Paris society in the '90s that even Proust is said to have murmured "Gloria in excelsis Cléo!" when she walked into Maxim...
...committee. How well that succeeds only time will tell. The staging of the ambitious new production of Aida, introduced a fortnight ago, turned out to be dull and far too stylized, but musically it was exciting. The Triumphal Scene was a staggering series of orchestral and choral climaxes. The Nile Scene, that exotic musical fantasy conjured up by Verdi to heighten the opera's denouement, shimmered with color and mystery...
Brutal Methods. It was Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1798-99 that helped launch the 19th century wave of Nile plunder. One of the expedition members most responsible was Vivant Denon, an artist and writer whose illustrated La Description de L'Egypte excited Europe's curiosity about the pharaohs' treasure. Unfortunately, though The Rape of the Nile reproduces dozens of Denon's paintings-and hundreds of other illustrations-only the dust jacket is in color...