Word: stevenson
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...follow the events through the eyes of Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), two lower-class soldiers in Caesar's 13th Legion. This plebeian odd couple--Pullo's a rogue, Vorenus a by-the-book prig--offer grounding and some nicely turned comic relief, as when Pullo, jailed for disobeying an order, petitions Forculus, a Roman god of doors. "I will kill for you a fine white lamb," he promises. "Or failing that--if I couldn't get a good one at a decent price--then six pigeons." But the scripts resort to contrivance and coincidence...
...busts: Caesar is a calculating pol, Mark Antony (James Purefoy) a narcissistic ass and Octavian (Max Pirkis)--Atia's son and the future Caesar Augustus--a precocious boy with a gift for Machiavellian strategy. The aim is to take those historical giants off their pedestals. "Nothing changes that much," Stevenson tells TIME. "Politicians will always be politicians...
...Until recently, the reputation of Stevenson's Pacific writings was in similar tatters. Growing up in Apia as a boy, and later on scholarship in New Zealand, Albert Wendt recalls reading Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde "like every other young person, but I never considered him an important writer." Seeking to reposition his work as rich and revelatory, Wellington University's Roger Robinson last year published Robert Louis Stevenson: His Best Pacific Writings. "Together they form a contribution to the literature in English of the Pacific, in five genres, that still stands unmatched," he concludes. So in this postcolonial...
...nonfiction that Wendt, the first Polynesian professor of New Zealand literature, believes will last. "As I write these words ? the sound of that vexed harbour hums in my ears," writes Stevenson in A Footnote to History (1892), his journalistic account of the cultural friction that greeted his 1889 arrival in Apia. Samoa was shaping up as the site of a naval conflict between Germany and the U.S., backed by Britain, but war was averted when a hurricane sank several battleships in Apia's harbor. Stevenson prophetically saw the disaster - which led to the signing of the Berlin Treaty...
...Stevenson's biggest legacy was to build a path toward Pacific literature. While printing presses were established as early as 1817 in Tahiti, books were slow to take hold in an oral society. In the early 1970s, when he returned to Apia to teach, Wendt concluded: "Samoa has no need of writers. It is waiting for tourists." But the writer persevered - and became one of the Pacific's best-known novelists. Wendt's 2003 epic The Mango's Kiss dramatizes the encounter between a village girl, Pele, loosely based on Wendt's grandmother, and a Scottish novelist called Leonard Roland...