Word: sultanly
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Contemporary chronicles testify to Vlad's many ingenious cruelties. When envoys from the Turkish Sultan refused to remove their turbans in Vlad's presence on the ground that this was not their custom, Vlad replied: "I would like to reinforce your custom." He thereupon ordered the turbans nailed to the Turks' heads. Vlad once gathered a "multitude" of sick and poor citizens in a castle, then bolted the doors and burned them alive so "there should be no more poor in my realm, leaving only the rich...
...candlelit setting looked like something out of a sultan's palace. The guests at Washington's Iranian embassy, however, were not princes and potentates, but Artist Jamie Wyeth, HUD Secretary Patricia Harris, Fashion Doyenne Diana Vreeland and a hundred other partygoers invited to Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi's Valentine's Night bash. The guest of honor: Pop Artist Andy Warhol, who earlier in the day had met President Carter at the White House. "Terrific, terrific," was Warhol's response to everything, including the centerpiece on the red satin tablecloth: a 3-ft. floral heart adorned with...
Died. Mrs. George Herman ("Babe") Ruth, 76, widow of the Sultan of Swat, baseball's greatest player; of cancer; in Manhattan. A Broadway dancer from Georgia, Claire Hodgson was unimpressed when she first met Ruth in 1923. "His face and his stomach were fat, his legs like a chorus girl's," she wrote in her 1959 memoir The Babe and I. As his second wife, she helped curb the Bambino's bacchanalian excesses during their 19-year marriage. After his death, she became the custodian of his legend. Though the Babe's home-run records...
...Majesty, it seems, is in the market for a monster five-story-high 7475P jet that would probably cost upward of $50 million and include a stratospheric throne plus a royal hospital room wired for communication via satellite. Back in Chicago, meanwhile, emissaries of Qabus bin Said, 35, Sultan of Oman, were content merely to rent space on a 747. Of course, the plane was needed to haul off some of the Sultan's own purchases, including six custom-made Cadillac Sevilles, one Porsche, a 25-ft. ocean-going speedboat with trailer, and a Chevy truck. The merchandise seemed...
...effective end of this war of muddle and misconception came in 1827, by mistake, when a small English and French peace-keeping fleet aroused the suspicion of a large Turkish fleet at Navarino. The Turks, who had never learned gunnery, opened fire. They were cut to pieces, and the Sultan's domination came to an end. Author Howarth, an English naval historian (Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch), writes of it all wonderingly, although not flippantly. His book is good mean fun for readers who are tired of the posturings of warriors and statesmen - then...