The Viceroy's fall: How Kitchener destroyed Curzon

by Peter King

By Peter King - 6x9" 310 pages historically photo illustrated. Copyright 1987,6, stated First published in Great Britain 1986 by Sidgwick & Jackson, London for cover price L12.95, Net U.K. only.

176 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1986

Reviews

[Mick Scrimshaw · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m interested in old politics and Britain’s colonial past as well as military history, so a book about the relationship of a former Viceroy of British controlled India and one of Britain’s most famous generals would seem right up my street and I didn’t know anything at all about Kitchener’s destruction of Lord Curzon, that led to his resignation and public downfall, about who should have strategic control over the army, the military or politically appointed civilians (i.e. democratic representatives). So this sounded interesting to me but while the historian Peter King had clearly spent a lot of time researching the matter, and had read hundreds and hundreds of letters and telegrams between a whole host of people involved, I’m afraid the book wasn’t that interesting and he was clearly prejudiced in favour of Curzon but wasn’t objective enough to convince the reader he wasn’t being unfairly drawn in a particular direction.

In the main, the book was simply a collection of many quotes from those various messages, and assumed quite a bit of pre-knowledge, or at least didn’t explain well enough some of the issues to someone like myself who did not have that pre-knowledge. Regardless of that, I did struggle through as I hoped what I learnt would help my understanding of the period for my future historical reading but I must be honest, by the second half of the book I was speed reading and/or missing out great chunks just to get to the important issues. To be honest I thing the whole story could have been explained in a relatively short essay rather than a 300-odd page book.