Charles Allen

Few themes in history have had as strong a hold on people's imagination. Fewer still have managed to alter the course of civilization. This is…

COROMANDEL. A name which has been long applied by Europeans to the Northern Tamil Country, or (more comprehensively) to the eastern coast of the Peninsula…

Since the Second World War the British Army has been engaged in armed conflicts around the globe in every year except 1968. Some have been…

Charles Allen captures the vanished world of British Colonial Africa in the recollections of the pioneering men and women who lived and worked there.

Throughout the East there runs a legend of a great mountain at the centre of the world, where four rivers have their source. Charles Allen…

India's lost emperor Ashoka Maurya has a special place in history. In his quest to govern India by moral force alone he turned Buddhism from…

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent his early years there, before being sent, aged six, to England, a desperately unhappy experience.…

PLAIN TALES FROM THE BRITISH EMPIRE gathers together Charles Allen's best loved books on the British experience across the Empire: PLAIN TALES FROM THE RAJ,…

The brutal assasination of Commissioner Frederick Mackeson on British India's North-West Frontier in 1853 was a bloody and public declaration of a conflict that was…

The Raj was, for two hundred years, the jewel in the British imperial crown. Although founded on military expansionism and undoubted exploitation, it developed over…

The idea of a hidden refuge, a paradise far from the stresses of modern life, has universal appeal. In 1932 the writer James Hilton coined…

This work chronicles the adventures of the last generation of British men and women who went East to seek their fortunes. Drawn into the colonial…