Word: pukka
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...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...
...Sikh families had a son in jail. High over Sant Fateh Singh's hut shone a solitary red electric light. When the light goes dark, it will mean that the holy man has died. And when that happens, said a high Indian official, "there'll be a pukka riot, you can be sure...
...irreverent writer in an irreverent age runs the risk of being an invisible man writing in invisible ink. Impish, antic Aubrey Menen has retained high visibility by spoofing the solemn and the sacred from pukka sahibs (The Prevalence of Witches) to Hindu epics (The Ramayana). In Rome for Ourselves he takes on another highly worshipful subject-the Eternal City. Tonic in tone and eclectic in vision, Menen's superbly illustrated Rome is an amusingly literate exercise in debunkmanship, the art of using the past while appearing to abuse...
...Star Sellers did in The Mouse That Roared. No comedian can rise to a challenge with greater stupor, or be more benumbingly British. Near the film's end, a Britisher bound for Gaillardia inquires whether the island offers anything to shoot. Answers Terry-Thomas, pukka as Lord Clive: ''Only the natives...
When the hour arrived for the honeymoon couple's departure on the yacht Britannia, Dimbleby met the severest test of his career: Margaret and Tony were late, leaving Dick Dimbleboom to fill the BBC air with 55 minutes of spontaneous prose. It was a pukka job, a splendid sort of flight of the Dimbleby. He talked fluently of the Thames, sturdily of Tower Bridge, thickly of the city's occasional fog. Five helicopters coptered overhead. Mounting to lance, Dimbleby told his audience: "If I had a really good air gun, I'd know what to do with...