Yet beneath the facade of implacable command was a moody, capricious man with a strained marriage: while he was in India, his wife Edwina had allegedly conducted an affair with the Indian politician Nehru.
But it was later in his magical children's books that his brilliance was most apparent, probably because the "grandiose, mercurial, capricious" man remained childlike in so many ways.
The show was pulled in August 1989, less than two years after its debut.Incorporating both cheek and critique, the directors of "Evocateur" offer a balanced view of this capricious man.
Unlike the rival pro-establishment Democrat Party, they have displayed remarkable unity.Mr Thaksin can wait: he is on good terms with the king's chosen successor, Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, a capricious man of a very different cut from his staid father.
In a way, he is the new South Africa's "holy fool"—comparable to the eccentric, capricious holy men in Tsarist Russia who could speak truth to power and somehow get away with it.
But, for all his high-blown anti-colonial and Marxist rhetoric, he is famously opportunistic on most matters of political principle, at once hard-nosed and capricious, a man of his word, whose word is forever changing.
A great director (Peter Brook) has scanned the text with fresh eyes and discovered a new protagonist – not the booming, righteously indignant Titan of old, but an edgy, capricious old man, intensely difficult to live with.
He is more likely to vote in a serious way than a capricious young man under 30.
Elena and Lila live in a world more openly shaped by capricious and violent men (make the wrong move, and a man will "smash your face"), and their experience of the afterlife of violence is also deeply unsettling.
He has had years to develop a sense of entitlement and the rich man's capricious and demanding manner.
