Word: thackerays
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Abraham Lincoln compared its power to the surging Mississippi River. Jane Austen found it so indispensable that she ironed it out when it was damp. Thackeray endured its "rather shabby pay," Coleridge tried in vain to join its staff, and Dickens endured its critical contempt. It accompanied the Light Brigade to the Valley of Death in the Crimea, and climbed with Edmund Hillary up Mount Everest. Although it proudly displays the royal coat of arms on its masthead, in an 1830 obituary it described the standard of conduct of King George IV as "little higher than that of animal indulgence...
...exotica. Harems aside, the subjects that most mesmerized them were slave markets, carpet bazaars, whirling dervishes, Arab stallions, caravans of caparisoned camels and wind-whipped burnooses of Bedouins on the sands of the Sahara. "There is a fortune to be made for painters in Cairo," noted William Makepeace Thackeray on a visit to Egypt in 1844. "I never saw such a variety of architecture, of life, of picturesqueness, of brilliant color, of light and shade. There is a picture in every street and at every bazaar stall." Some 70 years later another novelist, E.M. Forster, foresaw a dreary...
...town 32 miles northeast of Bombay with a history of Hindu-Muslim enmity: bitter fighting between Hindu and Muslim extremists in 1970 left 150 people dead. Tensions began to rise again in Bhiwandi and other Maharashtra towns earlier this year. One specific incident came in late April when Bal Thackeray, leader of a militant, right-wing Hindu organization called Shiv Sena, gave a speech in which he reportedly maligned the Islamic faith. Muslims retaliated by garlanding a portrait of Thackeray with dirty sandals, an insult to Hindus. Next, roving gangs of Shiv Sena members armed with gasoline bombs, daggers, spears...
...much later, in the nineteenth century, when the English had for centuries been shaping Ireland's history, the visitors sent home many reports. Their comments surfaced both in English guidebooks such as "Ireland: it's scenery, character, etc," and in the writings of Scott and Thackeray. Thackeray wrote, "Directly you see it, it smiles at you as innocent and friendly as a little child...
...altered. But Eric's conduct at Eton did not resemble the courtship of success. He idled his way through 4½ years at the apex of English secondary education, growing tall (6 ft. 3 in.) and awkward in the process. He read widely in his favorite authors (Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling, H.G. Wells), contributed some poems to school publications and took part grudgingly in athletics. His father could not afford to send him to Oxford or Cambridge without a scholarship, and Eric's academic performance ensured that no scholarship would be offered...