Kitchener: Hero and Anti-Hero

Description

Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Earl Kitchener of Khartoum (1850-1916) is one of the most important figures in the history of the British Empire. Beginning as Royal Engineer in the 1870s he would end his career over forty years later as Secretary of State for War - the iconic figure of World War I recruitment posters. In between he became both the most famous British soldier in the world during the peak period of European imperialism, and a celebrated and sometimes controversial pro-consul and administrator. At his death in 1916 he had literally become the 'face' of the British war effort. This new biography offers a timely and modern evaluation of a still disputed and complex military man of empire.

C. Brad Faught is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Tyndale University College in Toronto. A graduate of the Universities of Oxford and Toronto, he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Senior Fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Into Africa: The Imperial Life of Margery Perham; The New A-Z of Empire (both published by I.B.Tauris); The Oxford Movement: A Thematic History of the Tractarians and Their Times and Gordon: Victorian Hero.

'Written in a very clear and readable style and based upon thorough and excellent research. The various and often dramatic phases of Kitchener's rapid rise to national and international fame are chronicled with great skill, shrewdness and sensitivity... one of the best biographies of Kitchener to be written so far' - Denis Judd, author of Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present