Word: plunderers
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...biggest hits of the London theater season come from the pen of Ben Travers, an 89-year-old playwright who might well have been expected to have taken his final curtain. The National Theater has revived Travers' Plunder, serene fare today but daring when it was first produced 48 years ago because it set jewel theft and murder in a French-window farce. And brand new is The Bed Before Yesterday, a West End comedy that stars Joan Plowright as a foul-tempered, filthy-rich, frustrated widow belatedly discovering the pleasures of the marriage bed. The double-header triumph...
...matter where it appeared, the document was hardly compelling reading. A wordy piece of revolutionary rhetoric, the manifesto excoriated Owens-Illinois as "one of the many multinationals that plunder the country" and called for Venezuelans to "strengthen their fight for socialism." Nonetheless, the episode apparently enraged the Perez regime. After a Cabinet meeting, the Information Minister announced that the government had "decided to acquire the stock"-meaning expropriation-of the Owens-Illinois subsidiary because it had "offended the dignity of the country and promoted the subversion of our constitutional order...
This anecdote is one of the more outrageous tales that British-born Archaeologist Brian Fagan records in this brisk and knowledgeable history of the plunder of Egypt. But it was only one of thousands of depredations, many carried out on a much grander scale. During the reign of Pasha Mohammed Ali (1805-1849), for example, one-quarter of the great Temple of Dendereh was quarried away by Egyptians to build a saltpeter factory. Ali also ordered the excavation of the exquisite Temple of Esneh because he wanted to use it as a secure munitions depot. Art collectors were scarcely better...
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...
...then fall farther than their worst fears. They sweep into the country with a shipment of rifles, organize the natives into armies and take over as rulers. Danny is taken for a god and made king. The .wealth of the entire country is at hand and ready for plunder. Danny, however, decides to live the dream, take a wife and settle into monarchy. Before Peachy starts back across the mountain with half the national treasury, Danny asks him to stay for the wedding. At the ceremony, Danny's new bride bites him on the cheek, and he bleeds...