Published continuously by Penguin since 1937, Evelyn Waugh is one of the greatest satirical writers of the twentieth century. In this irreverent personal account of the crowning of the last Emperor of Ethiopia, he makes full use of his comic genius, brilliantly capturing the bureaucracy, lunacy and passion of a country gripped by coronation fever.

Until late on the preceding afternoon, wild uncertainty prevailed about the allocation of tickets for the coronation. The legations knew nothing. Mr Hall knew nothing, and his office was continuously besieged by anxious journalists whose only hope of getting their reports back in time for Monday's papers was to write and dispatch them well before the event. What could they say when they did not even know where the ceremony would take place?

With little disguised irritation they set to work making the best of their meagre material. Gorgis and its precincts were impenetrably closed; a huge tent could be discerned through the railings, built against one wall of the church. Some described the actual coronation as taking place there; others used it as the scene of a state reception and drew fanciful pictures of the ceremony in the interior of the cathedral, 'murky, almost suffocating with incense and the thick, stifling smoke of tallow candles' (Associated Press); authorities on Coptic ritual remarked that as the coronation proper must take place in the inner sanctuary, which no layman might glimpse, much less enter, there was small hope of anyone seeing anything at all, unless, conceivably, exceptions were made of the Duke of Gloucester and Prince Uldine. The cinema-men, whose companies had spent very large sums in importing them and their talking apparatus, began to show signs of restlessness, and some correspondents became almost menacing in their representations of the fury of a slighted Press. Mr Hall, however, remained his own serene self. Everything, he assured us, was being arranged for our particular convenience; only, he admitted, the exact details were still unsettled.

Eventually, about fourteen hours before the ceremony was due to start, numbered tickets were issued through the legations; there was plenty of room for all, except, as it happened, for the Abyssinians themselves. The rases and Court officials were provided with gilt chairs, but the local chiefs seemed to be wholly neglected; most of them remained outside, gazing wistfully at the ex-Kaiser's coach and the tall hats of the European and American visitors; those that succeeded in pushing their way inside were kept far at the back, where they squatted together on their haunches, or, in all the magnificent trappings of their gala dress, dozed simply in distant corners of the great tent.

For it was there, in the end, that the service took place.

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