Issyvoo

Books The Emperor

The accounts by the lowliest of the palace officials are the most interesting. Something of Oliver Sacks in the other ‘verbatim’ accounts. It’s not always easy to believe these articulate and over-literary witnesses or to trust that words are not being put into their mouths.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at London Review of Books Alan Bennett London Review of Books 1986
Ryszard Kapuscinski has delivered to us what may be the last message from a time when societies did not change, when the life of one generation was the life of the next.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Neal Ascherson New York Review of Books 1983

With its wide-eyed barbarities and absurd protocol, The Emperor reads like a cross between a Ruritanian operetta and the last act of a Jacobean tragedy. The medieval atmosphere and a purblind obsession with dignity and esteem virtually guaranteed the collapse of Haile Selassie’s court and empire and closed another bizarre chapter in the history of modern Africa.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at London Review of Books William Boyd London Review of Books 1983