Word: pukka
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...London, and he is on the line. Contentedly he clicks down the phone. Shy men like Sellers hate to talk to friends, let alone strangers. Sellers is the world's best mimic, equipped with an enormous range of accents, inflections and dialects-including five kinds of cockney, Mayfair pukka, stiff upper BBC, Oxford, Cambridge, Yorkshire, Lancashire, West Country, Highland Scots, Edinburgh Scots, Glaswegian Scots, Tyneside Geordie, Northern Ireland, Southern Ireland, French, Mitteleuropa, American Twang, American Drawl, American Snob, Canadian, Australian and three kinds of Indian. He fools everybody. Everybody but his friends, that is; they are wise...
...thing he plans to settle down in is a helicopter-on the spacious lawn outside his home in pukka Coldwater Canyon. Some 25 of his neighbors turned up to protest at a hearing in the West Los Angeles city hall. "He's a nighttime person," said a neighbor. "Parties start in the middle of the night and you can hear them through the canyon. The neighbors wake up and spend an irate night. It hasn't been too bad lately, though. But can you imagine how a helicopter would sound taking off from here in the middle...
Rattigan and Mills thus create an absorbing Theory of Lawrence, but the play sometimes slithers toward schoolboy romantics and when-empire-was-in-flower nostalgia. No amount of skilled acting can wholly conceal that General Allenby (John Williams) is a stock pukka sahib, that the commander at Deraa (Geoffrey Keen) is a stock sweaty Turkish dog of a villain, and that Auda Abu Tayi (Paul Sparer) is a stock native chief, corrupt but endearing...
...pukka youth in London, Sir Hari made his first headlines when, in the company of a Mrs. Maudie Robinson, he was surprised in a hotel room by a man claiming to be Mrs. Robinson's husband. Before young Sir Hari discovered that the man was not her husband and that he was the victim of one of the world's oldest blackmail games, he had paid $750,000 to the conspirators, among them his own British aide. Eventually, the truth came out and the case went to court, where Sir Hari's own counsel, Lord John Simon...
...begin his career as a naturalist. The regiment went to India instead. When his application for transfer to Africa finally came through in 1926, Ionides became successively an ivory poacher, a big game hunter, a game warden, and a devout herpetologist. Piecing all these lives of a non-pukka sahib together, Biographer Alan Wykes, a London magazine editor, has drawn a fascinating profile of a man with all the imperious instincts of an aristocrat and not an inhibiting trace of the code of a gentleman. Snake Man neatly blends action and memory, talk and adventure, snake lore and Ionides lore...