"Maude, Get the Snaffle!"

I’m back into David Gilmour’s Curzon, which I started last fall and set aside (link). That would be George Nathaniel Curzon (“superior person”), the very model of a high-noon British imperialist. It’s smoothly and gracefully written, and it is full of chilling lessons about the risks and possibilities of empire. It is also, sometimes, simply funny, as in this account of Curzon’s kit list for a trip to Persia:

[A]s Persia had no railway and only two carriageable roads, he would be obliged to travel everywhere on the back of a horse or a mule. Following this experience, he therefore advised later travelers to take, among many other things, two Gladstone bags, an English military swaddle, a snaffle and a two-reined bridle, a Norfolk jacket, towels and a folding indiarubber bath (‘Persians do not wash in our sense of the term’), a revolver, a Cardigan waistcoat and tins of Crosse & Blackwell’s ‘quite excellent’ soup. The most important items, however, were a suit of dress clothes and a large flask which he kept in one of his holsters. Commiserating with a teetotaler who had to ride through Persia, he warned that a traveler would be tempting providence if he did not have some restorative at hand.

--David Gilmour, Curzon 76-7 (Papermac paperback ed. 1995)

“Maude, get the snaffle! We’re off to visit the Shah!”