Book description
After the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974, which ended the ancient
rule of the Abyssinian monarchy, Ryszard Kapuscinski travelled to
Ethiopia and sought out surviving courtiers to tell their stories. Here,
their eloquent and ironic voices depict the lavish, corrupt world they
had known - from the rituals, hierarchies and intrigues at court to the
vagaries of a ruler who maintained absolute power over his impoverished
people. They describe his inexorable downfall as the Ethiopian military
approach, strange omens appear in the sky and courtiers vanish, until
only the Emperor and his valet remain in the deserted palace, awaiting
their fate. Dramatic and mesmerising, The Emperor is one of the great
works of reportage and a haunting epitaph on the last moments of a dying
regime. Born in Pinsk, now in Belarus, in 1932, Kapuscinski was the
pre-eminent writer among Polish reporters. Kapuscinski's best-known book
is just such a reportage-novel of the decline of Haile Selassie's
anachronistic regime in Ethiopia - The Emperor, which has been
translated into many languages. Shah of Shahs, about the last Shah of
Iran, and Imperium, about the last days of the Soviet Union, have
enjoyed similar success. He died in January 2007. Neal Ascherson was
born in Edinburgh in 1932, and has worked as a journalist all his life -
mostly as a foreign correspondent in east-central Europe and in Africa.
For some 12 years he was a columnist on The Observer and The Independent
on Sunday. He wrote two books about Poland, and his recent works include
Black Sea (1995) and Stone Voices (2002). Neal Ascherson lives in London
and is married to the journalist and broadcaster Isabel Hilton.
