Philip Mason Knihy

How did a few thousand British troops hold down a subcontinent of 200 million people? In his superb short history of the Indian army, Philip Mason, himself a longstanding officer in the elite Indian civil service, evokes the threads of loyalty that bound the British and the sepoys together until the threads snapped in 1857, and even after that brutal rupture were sewn up again, so that the British influence lingers on in the far larger army that independent India deploys today.

The idea of the gentleman is central to the English view of the world. It runs through and illuminates English history at least from the time of Chaucer's parfit gentil knight. For the Victorians, it provided a second religion which underpinned not only daily life, but the whole edifice of empire.

A study of the characters and public careers of Englishmen who founded and developed British rule in India from 1600 to 1947