This is the story of what happens when a liberal minded Prime Minister is caught between two sets of fundamentalists, one Islamic, the other Christian. It could be a tale of our time. But this is actually the story of Islam and the Empire on the Nile c 1869. In the late 19th century the river Nile became the setting for the first major encounter between the West and Islam in the modern era. In an extraordinary collision between Europeans, Arabs and Africans, three empires rose in the space of thirty years. In the climax of this drama, played out in a remote part of the Sudan, we see the rise of the British Empire to its most glorious heights, but also the seeds of its fall. The personalities are legends: William Gladstone, General Gordon, Winston Churchill and General Kitchener. Yet this is a story also told through the eyes of the outsiders - a missionary, a slave trader, a palace clerk and an ordinary soldier. Using never before transcribed material from newly translated government papers in Cairo and Khartoum, Green will tell both sides of the story, reassessing familiar characters and discovering new perspectives on both Arab and African sides, using his acclaimed skill as a story-teller so that the effect is that of an old photo album whose recurring characters and themes carry a wide sweep of time and events, and tells the story of a time when good intentions became compromised, finally giving way to realpolitik, and how on such changes of attitude empires rise and fall.
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"The tale has been told many times before but rarely with Green's verve and wit...This is popular history at its best" (Sunday Times )
"Dominic Green's qualifications for writing about the Mahdist state established in Sudan between 1881 and 1898 are a degree in English from Oxford and a stint playing guitar behind Dionne Warwick. It proves a model education. The story of the Mahdist uprising, the dispatch of General Charles George Gordon, his heroic defence of Khartoum and death in 1885, has been told too often, but rarely with such clarity and panache..." (Saturday Guardian Review ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
"Dominic Green's qualifications for writing about the Mahdist state established in Sudan between 1881 and 1898 are a degree in English from Oxford and a stint playing guitar behind Dionne Warwick. It proves a model education. The story of the Mahdist uprising, the dispatch of General Charles George Gordon, his heroic defence of Khartoum and death in 1885, has been told too often, but rarely with such clarity and panache..." (Saturday Guardian Review ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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From the writer of the critically acclaimed The Double Life of Doctor Lopez comes the epic nineteenth-century tale of the rise and fall of the world's three most powerful empires (20041021)
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