19th century, IrelandMaggie Connell has been able to create a new life for herself on the Atlantic Way despite her feral upbringing with the Fomorians. But for Maggie, life is always good until it's not....

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 traces this legend to Western Tibet where there stands Kailas,...

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 territories scattered around the South China Sea, they...

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 full-scale military campaigns, but most have been undeclared...

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 centuries into what has been called...

This text retells the story of a brotherhood of young men who together laid claim to one of the most notorious frontiers in the world: India's north-west frontier, which in the late 1990s forms the volatile...

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. Charles Allen's great-grandfather brought the sixteen-year-old...

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 a minor sect into a world religion, and set up a new yardstick...

Today there are many Buddhists in the West, but for 2000 years the Buddha's teachings were unknown outside Asia. It was not until the late 18th century, when Sir William Oriental Jones, a British judge...

In December 1903 a British army marched over the Himalayas to counter a non-existent Russian threat and was confronted by a medieval Tibetan army ordered to stop it by non-violent means. It was a clash...

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 the word 'Shangri-La' to describe such a place, when he gave...

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 of India.This is the India highly acclaimed historian...

From the darkness of the Feast Pit, an ancient vampiric evil crawls out of the ocean caves of the Atlantic Way. They cast a village in a dark mist, trapping them in a nightmare without end, and force...

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 Charles Allen's definitive account of the Aryans, offering...

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

What are the roots of today's militant fundamentalism in the Muslim world? In this insightful and wide-ranging history, Charles Allen finds an answer in an eighteenth-century reform movement of Muhammed...