Word: sahibs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...during World War II, where British prisoners, at forced labor, are building a railroad from Bangkok to Rangoon. At one prison camp along the way, the fanatical Japanese commandant, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), is having trouble. The senior officer of a new consignment of prisoners, a prim old pukka sahib named...
This charming book consists of impressionistic sketches of the sprawling Asian subcontinent done in the pale pastel shades of life rather than its raw primary colors. Filtered through Author (Black Narcissus) Godden's genteel mem-sahib vision, India becomes a setting instead of a place, Hindus and Moslems become figures in a tapestry instead of people, and life moves to the lute strings of poetry instead of the purse strings of necessity. As a free versifier, Author Godden ranks somewhat below another run-of-the-pagoda poet, Emperor Hirohito...
...Percy Howard) Newby, 39, is a puckish soldier turned professor, proletarian turned sahib. His The Picnic at Sakkara (TIME, Aug. 29, 1955) was a rich and penetrating fantasy of life in the Nile delta in the last hours of King Farouk. In Revolution and Roses he has moved on in time to the period when an Egyptian army clique led by General Naguib and Colonel Nasser turn out Farouk and take on the cumbrous business of governing a country that had "never had any real independence since...
Dostoevsky with Gin. The British run justice, administration and the drains, but they have the dead feeling that they are only caretakers for the Chinese and Indian merchants who run the rackets. The new sahibs come from unstately homes (with names like Kosy Kot) in dim English suburbs. They never had it so good ("We're on to a good thing here, and for Christ's sake let's enjoy it"), but it is not good enough. They are perpetually in hock to the merchants, forever struggling to make the frayed ends of their tropical pants match...
Author Mary McMinnies, herself a charter mem-sahib (as wife of a Foreign Service official in Malaya), has a cold Waugh eye and ear for colonial types. The U.S. reader, however, cutting his way through the alphabet jungles of British officialese, should know that D.O.M. does not stand for some esoteric military order but merely for Dirty Old Man. It is all a long way from W.M.B.-the White Man's Burden of the great, dead Kipling days...