Word: splendour
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...Last World, catches the rhythms and flavors of the streets, nightclubs and Latin family life. Castillo is all melody, by turns upbeat and melancholy. By age 60, his best performances on bandstand and bedstead behind him, he occupies a room in an East Harlem flop mockingly called the Hotel Splendour. There, his music out of style, his body failing, he thrives on memories of songs sung and women loved. Yet, as Hijuelos conveys with art and sympathy, the Mambo King is to be admired and envied as a man who squeezed the juice out of life before life squeezed...
...friend of his late father's, invited him to attend his coronation. The feudal pageantry of the occasion has been described with condescending vividness by Evelyn Waugh, then a correspondent for Fleet Street. By contrast, Thesiger notes sadly that during his absence of eleven years "the age-old splendour of Abyssinia" had been fading. The Emperor's bodyguard wore khaki; the palace secretaries were in tailcoats. Thesiger met the celebrated author of Vile Bodies and found him foppish and petulant. He refused Waugh's request to accompany him on an expedition among the touchy Danakil. "Had he come," he adds...
...Skidelsky observes, "No one in England gets far on brains alone." Keynes would not or could not be charming. As he bitterly appreciated, his lanky, uncoordinated body and equine face were not assets. Virginia Woolf placed him among the Bloomsbury men she classified as deficient in "physical splendour." "Rude" was one of the words his friends used to describe him, to which Skidelsky adds "arrogant" and "prickly...
Despite these caveats, and with the help of guides and a letter of introduction from Oxford to the local authorities ("a talisman of medieval- looking splendour"), the Englishmen persevere--and suffer as advertised. Insects attack them everywhere ("I covered myself in SAS anti-fungus powder until my erogenous zone looked like meat chunks rolled in flour"), hordes of leeches rush across the jungle floor to greet them, and cicadas, "megaphones built into their bodies," keep up a decibel level "way over the limit allowed in discotheques...
...into the realm of such nonsense, but the "Gozzi Surprise," despite the comical efforts of Ben Haley's sorceress and Rodney Hudson's monstrous cook with a 10-foot, lethal ladle, never gets off the ground. Its absurdity remains strangely humorless and merely casts in greater relief the splendour and sublimity of The King Stag...