Volume 33, Number 17 · November 6, 1986
The Last Idol
By Neal Ascherson
Kitchener: The Man Behind the Legend
by Philip Warner
Atheneum, 247 pp., $15.95
The Kitchener Enigma
by Trevor Royle
Michael Joseph, 436 pp., £15
They labor on, these optimistic British biographers, trying to make us love the builders of the Empire. They certainly succeed in making them impressive. Giant, irascible figures, they sweat across deserts, hack their way through leagues of bush growing with equally irascible insects, subdue chieftains, princes, and emirs, lay out cities and span continents with irrigation canals, and—under canvas or in palaces of whitewashed mud—scrawl their long letters to pale, frock-coated politicians in Whitehall whose only wish is that they would be devoured by a lion or accept immediate retirement with an earldom.
Review, 3044 words
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