Word: saracens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...SARACEN'S HEAD (68 pp.)-Osbert Lancaster-Houghton M/ffl/n...
Willie made out all right. In The Saracen's Head, London Daily Express Cartoonist Osbert Lancaster thrusts greatness upon his unwilling hero in a bland satire that good-naturedly kids the iron pants off the whole profession of medieval arms. Written as a juvenile, it is the kind of literary fare that parents will gobble up if they can get it away from the kids. The Saracen's Head can be read in an hour, but in that brief time Willie runs his shaky lance through El Babooni, the infidel champ, is knighted by King Richard I himself...
Figures (TIME, Jan. 17), the sly charm of Saracen's Head will come as no surprise. Lancaster's own illustrations, in color and black & white, are so pointed that those too lazy to read can join him in his laugh at the age of chivalry by merely turning the pages...
...Holy City's sun-baked walls and domes had dominated the ages. Doomed to repeated conquest, it had heard the clatter of Egyptian cavalry, the rattle of Persian scythe-wheeled chariots, had known Assyrian and Babylonian, the Macedonian phalanx and the Roman legion, Seleucid and Seljuk, Crusader, Saracen and Ottoman Turk. One conqueror supplanted the other, or declined to impotent passivity. But Jerusalem still remained, permanent in the perspective of history, as the city sometimes appears in a sudden lifting of the haze, crowning Zion...
...Saint-Tropez, with tall pink and ocher houses overlooking the protected bay where in peacetime the British Mediterranean Fleet used to anchor on its annual vacation cruise, was captured by a parachute unit dropped there by mistake. In sun-drenched Hyères, where the girls are dark and Saracen and the streets are lined with palms, the Germans still held. Fréjus, where Julius Caesar planted supplies for Gaul, was taken the first day. Saint-Raphael, a modest fishing village gone garish with the trappings of a modern coast resort, was quickly captured, too. But Cannes, its luxury...