This is an extremely good introduction to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. The story is well told, and is told with a rare pace that kept me hooked throughout. The book seems to have been extremely well researched, and the causes for the mutiny well analysed.

In the end, the chief conspirators remain in the shadow, and the British Empire reigned supreme. Maybe, as he said, India was not ready. we sometimes forget that mutinies and their spread are extremely complex stories, and that they cannot be ascribed to simple, single incidents as they are in schools.

He seems to have a great deal of admiration for the Rani of Jhansi, and it shows.

My only quibble, is that there is a lot of material about the atrocities that the British people suffered at the hands of the Indians, and not enough about the other way around. This could be because of the paucity of material from the Indian perspective.

Having said that, the book is very well balanced, and finely nuanced. This is a complex bit of Indian history, and he has done a fantastic job in bringing it to life. ( )

A very good, if "Anglo", retelling of The Indian Mutiny. Previously, I had a vague idea that there was a mutiny in 1857 and that the Black Hole of Calcutta was somehow involved but the author has filled me in nicely.

As mentioned, this is very much a retelling of the English side of the story and we get much more details of the English soldiers and settlers than of the Indian mutineers (or indeed of the Indian soldiers that remained loyal to the British. In particular, I once watched an Indian movie on a man named Mangal Pandey, who was renowned as the spark of the Indian Mutiny. Yet, in this book, the author gives Pandey one dismissive sentence. ( )

A solid account of the wars of 1858-9 in India which synthesizes conventional accounts of the war without breaking any new ground. It places a particular emphasis on the institutional failures of the army and the growing alienation of many of its native troops. ( )