Charles Allen – författare

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 ''benign autocracy'' - the government of many by few, with the active collaboration of most Indians in recognition of a desire for the advancement of their country.Charles Allen''s classic oral history of the period that marked the end of British rule was first published a generation ago. Now reissued as the imperial century closes, this brilliantly insightful and bestselling collection of reminiscences illustrates the unique experience of British India: the sadness and luxury for some; the joy and deprivation for others.

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 Kipling out to Lahore to work on The Civil and Military Gazette with the words ''Kipling will do'', and thus set young Rudyard on his literary course. And so it was that at the start of the cold weather of 1882 he stepped ashore at Bombay on 18 October 1882 - ''a prince entering his kingdom''. He stayed for seven years during which he wrote the work that established him as a popular and critical, sometimes controversial, success. Charles Allen has written a brilliant account of those years - of an Indian childhood and coming of age, of abandonment in England, of family and Empire. He traces the Indian experiences of Kipling''s parents, Lockwood and Alice and reveals what kind of culture the young writer was born into and then returned to when still a teenager. It is a work of fantastic sympathy for a man - though not blind to Kipling''s failings - and the country he loved.

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 that name to a hidden valley in the Himalayas in his novel LOST HORIZON.In THE SEARCH FOR SHANGRI-LA acclaimed traveller and writer Charles Allen explores the myth behind the story. He tracks down the sources that Hilton drew upon in writing his popular romance, and then sets out to discover what lies behind the legend that inspired him. In the course of a lively and amusing account of his four journeys into Tibet, Allen also gives us a controversial new reading of the country''s early history, shattering our notions of Tibet as a Buddhist paradise and restoring the mysterious pre-Buddhist religion of Bon to its rightful place in Tibetan culture. He also locates the lost kingdom of Shang-shung and, in doing so, the original Shangri-La itself: in an astounding gorge beyond the Himalayas, full of extraordinary ruins.

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 wars, fought out in such widely differing theatres as Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Brunei, Borneo, Aden, Oman and Northern Ireland.The Savage Wars of Peace is the fighting soldiers'' view of these campaigns, recounted in their own words to oral historian Charles Allen, chronicler of such classics as Plain Tales from the Raj and Tales from the South China Seas. Drawing on the spoken recollections of over seventy military figures of all ranks, Charles Allen has assembled a rich kaleidoscope of images of warfare as experienced by those at the sharp end.Letting the soldiers speak for themselves, with extraordinary and sometimes very moving candour, these unique first-hand accounts give a rare insight into Britain''s modern ''peacetime'' army - the changes it has undergone since 1945, and the bonds that unite fighting men.