Sikunder Burnes

Author : Craig Murray
Publisher : Casemate Publishers
Page : 483 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2016-10-20
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780857902511

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Sikunder Burnes by Craig Murray Pdf

A biography that “restore[s] this remarkable young man to his rightful position as a leading figure in Scotland’s contribution to our imperial history” (The Scottish Review). This is an astonishing true tale of espionage, journeys in disguise, secret messages, double agents, assassinations and sexual intrigue. Alexander Burnes was one of the most accomplished spies Britain ever produced and the main antagonist of the Great Game as Britain strove with Russia for control of Central Asia and the routes to the Raj. There are many lessons for the present day in this tale of the folly of invading Afghanistan and Anglo-Russian tensions in the Caucasus. Murray’s meticulous study has unearthed original manuscripts from Montrose to Mumbai to put together a detailed study of how British secret agents operated in India. The story of Burnes’ life has a cast of extraordinary figures, including Queen Victoria, King William IV, Earl Grey, Benjamin Disraeli, Lola Montez, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. Among the unexpected discoveries are that Alexander and his brother James invented the myths about the Knights Templars and Scottish Freemasons which are the foundation of the Da Vinci Code; and that the most famous nineteenth-century scholar of Afghanistan was a double agent for Russia. “An important re-evaluation of this most intriguing figure.” —William Dalrymple, bestselling author of The Anarchy “Murray’s book is a terrific read. He has done full justice to the life of a remarkable British hero, without ignoring his faults.” —Daily Mail “A fascinating book . . . his research has been prodigious, both in libraries and on foot. He knows a huge amount about Burnes’s life and work.” —The Scotsman

Author : Craig Murray
Publisher : Mainstream Publishing
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2014-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 184596361X

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Sikunder Burnes by Craig Murray Pdf

At 24 years old, Lt. Alexander Burnes set out up the River Indus in charge of a flotilla of large native sailing vessels, ostensibly to escort an improbable present of five huge English dray horses from King George IV to India's most powerful independent ruler, the Maharajah Runjit Singh of Lahore. The 1,000 mile river route led straight through the hostile territory of the Emirs of Scinde, and spying was their real purpose. Burnes had already come to the attention of the British rulers of India by his explorations of the deserts and principalities of British India's North West Frontier. But for the remaining 13 years of his short life Burnes was destined to be the most famous, accomplished, and ultimately tragic figure of the great game of Anglo-Russian rivalry for dominion in Central Asia. His life surpassed any fictional adventure story--whether shipwrecked on a hostile shore, snowblind at 17,000 feet in the Hindu Kush, swimming the mighty Oxus, riding an expiring camel in the vast sand dunes of the Karakum desert, or shooting the murderous rapids of the Kabul river, Burnes had enormous physical reserves. He often traveled in disguise--as an Armenian horse-coper, a Persian secretary, a Hindu mystic or a Bokharan Jew, among others--aided by an amazing ability at languages, in situations where exposure could mean instant death. The climactic set piece of the Great Game is Burnes hosting Christmas dinner in 1837 for the Russian spy Jan Prosper Vitkevitch in Kabul. Burnes was a true product of Enlightenment Scotland, and on his travels he spent as much time on archaeological and geological exploration and a passionate pursuit of literature and poetry of all cultures, as on his official duties. Alexander's love life is legendary, and indeed his seductions of Afghan women have been advanced by many serious historians as a cause of the successful Afghan rebellion against British controlled rule. The truth, however, proves to be much more complex. Burnes died in 1841, a victim of the First Afghan War, which he had tried to prevent, believing the British invasion of Afghanistan a colossal blunder. He had been directly requested by the Governor-General of India to accompany the expedition and felt it was his patriotic duty to assist. He thus foreshadowed the fate of many countrymen who died nobly in useless wars in more recent times. Burnes' great popularity plummeted after his death as he became a convenient scapegoat for a disastrous war. This is the first full biography of Burnes, and the first of any kind researched from original sources. Former Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray brings to bear his own formidable knowledge of the geography and cultures of both Central Asia and of Scotland. Murray argues that Burnes is a most unjustly neglected figure, and much published about him is simply wrong. From the astonishing role of the small town of Montrose in ruling India through to the events of the First Afghan War, Murray challenges us fundamentally to reappraise a half-forgotten heritage.

Author : James Burnes
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 136 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 1851
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OXFORD:590184614

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Notes on his name and family, by J. Burnes by James Burnes Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Government Printing Office
Page : 112 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2024-06-15
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Studies in Intelligence by Anonim Pdf

Author : Engineer Fazel Ahmed Afghan, MSc
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
Page : 780 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2015-06-12
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781503573000

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Conspiracies and Atrocities in Afghanistan by Engineer Fazel Ahmed Afghan, MSc Pdf

Afghanistan is the victim of conspiracies. History tells us about happenings and events of the past. Life would be empty in the absence of history. Therefore, the author—intrinsically motivated to understand his roots, his motherland, and the cause for the backwardness and suffering of Afghanistan—decided to take this adventurous journey and complete this three-hundred-year history in thirty years and share them with all those interested about Afghanistan issues. In the course of thirty years, the author had gone through very rough, bumpy, and sometimes painful routes, making him cry, especially feeling in his heart the pain and fear of not reaching the destiny. In spite of all his difficulties, he has dug out a lot of painful documents from very reliable sources and compiled them in this book titled Conspiracies and Atrocities in Afghanistan: 1700–2014. Thereby, the author of this book has endeavored to present the link between various eras and major historic events inside Afghanistan with the purpose of exposing the facts about the Afghan and foreign conspiracies and atrocities which, as a result, caused the backwardness of this nation. Afghanistan has suffered immensely through the course of this three-hundred-year journey and especially in the last thirty-six years. The author leaves the judgement to the respected readers.

Author : Diana Preston
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2012-02-21
Category : History
ISBN : 9780802776068

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The Dark Defile by Diana Preston Pdf

"The consequences of crossing the Indus once to settle a government in Afghanistan will be a perennial march into that country."--The Duke of Wellington, 1838 "There is nothing more to be dreaded or guarded against in our endeavor to re-establish the Afghan monarchy than the overweening confidence with which Europeans are too often accustomed to regard the excellence of their own institutions and the anxiety that they display to introduce them in new and untried soils."--Claude Wade, January 1839. Convinced in 1839 that Britain's invaluable empire in India was threatened by Russia, Persia, and Afghan tribes, the British government ordered its Army of the Indus into Afghanistan to oust from power the independent-minded king Dost Mohammed and install in Kabul the unpopular puppet ruler Shah Shuja. Expecting a quick campaign, the British found themselves trapped by unforeseen circumstances; eventually the tribes united and the seemingly omnipotent army was slaughtered in 1842 as it desperately retreated through the mountain passes from Kabul to Jalalabad. Only one man survived. Diana Preston vividly recounts the drama of this First Afghan War, the opening salvo in the strategic rivalry between Britain and Russia for supremacy in Central Asia. As insightful about geography as she is about political and military miscalculation, Preston draws on rarely documented letters and diaries to bring alive long lost characters--Lord Auckland, the weak British Governor-General in India; his impetuous aide William McNaghten; the prescient adventurer-envoy Alexander Burnes, whose sage advice was steadfastly ignored. A model of compelling narrative history, The First Afghan War is a cautionary tale that resonates loudly today.

Author : J. H. Stocqueler
Publisher : BoD – Books on Demand
Page : 486 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2024-05-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9783368729103

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Memorials of Affghanistan : Being State Papers, Official Documents, Dispatches, Authentic Narratives, etc. by J. H. Stocqueler Pdf

Reprint of the original, first published in 1843.

Author : William Dalrymple
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 494 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2013-04-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9780307958297

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Return of a King by William Dalrymple Pdf

From William Dalrymple—award-winning historian, journalist and travel writer—a masterly retelling of what was perhaps the West’s greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris that has striking relevance to our own time. With access to newly discovered primary sources from archives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India—including a series of previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and biographies—the author gives us the most immediate and comprehensive account yet of the spectacular first battle for Afghanistan: the British invasion of the remote kingdom in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets, and facing little resistance, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the mountain passes from India into Afghanistan in order to reestablish Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, and as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into rebellion. This First Anglo-Afghan War ended with an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world ambushed and destroyed in snowbound mountain passes by simply equipped Afghan tribesmen. Only one British man made it through. But Dalrymple takes us beyond the bare outline of this infamous battle, and with penetrating, balanced insight illuminates the uncanny similarities between the West’s first disastrous entanglement with Afghanistan and the situation today. He delineates the straightforward facts: Shah Shuja and President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage; the Shah’s principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today make up the bulk of the Taliban’s foot soldiers; the same cities garrisoned by the British are today garrisoned by foreign troops, attacked from the same rings of hills and high passes from which the British faced attack. Dalryrmple also makes clear the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan’s age-old tribal rivalries, the stranglehold they have on the politics of the nation and the ways in which they ensnared both the British in the nineteenth century and NATO forces in the twenty-first. Informed by the author’s decades-long firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan, and superbly shaped by his hallmark gifts as a narrative historian and his singular eye for the evocation of place and culture, The Return of a King is both the definitive analysis of the First Anglo-Afghan War and a work of stunning topicality.

Author : Edmund Richardson
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2022-04-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781250278609

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The King's Shadow by Edmund Richardson Pdf

Impeccably researched, and written like a thriller, Edmund Richardson's The King's Shadow is the extraordinary untold and wild journey of Charles Masson - think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid meets Indiana Jones - and his search for the Lost City of Alexandria in the "Wild East" during the age of empires, kings, and spies. For centuries the city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains was a meeting point of East and West. Then it vanished. In 1833 it was discovered in Afghanistan by the unlikeliest person imaginable: Charles Masson, deserter, pilgrim, doctor, archaeologist, spy, one of the most respected scholars in Asia, and the greatest of nineteenth-century travelers. On the way into one of history's most extraordinary stories, he would take tea with kings, travel with holy men and become the master of a hundred disguises; he would see things no westerner had glimpsed before and few have glimpsed since. He would spy for the East India Company and be suspected of spying for Russia at the same time, for this was the era of the Great Game, when imperial powers confronted each other in these staggeringly beautiful lands. Masson discovered tens of thousands of pieces of Afghan history, including the 2,000-year-old Bimaran golden casket, which has upon it the earliest known face of the Buddha. He would be offered his own kingdom; he would change the world, and the world would destroy him. This is a wild journey through nineteenth-century India and Afghanistan, with impeccably researched storytelling that shows us a world of espionage and dreamers, ne'er-do-wells and opportunists, extreme violence both personal and military, and boundless hope. At the edge of empire, amid the deserts and the mountains, it is the story of an obsession passed down the centuries.

Author : Philip Hensher
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 498 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2003-10-14
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781400030897

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The Mulberry Empire by Philip Hensher Pdf

With Tolstoyan sweep and Dickensian vitality, this epically involving historical novel relates England’s tragic adventure in Afghanistan, which began with the triumphant arrival of the Army of the Indus in 1839 and ended three years later in rout and massacre. At the center of The Mulberry Empire is Alexander Burnes, a Scots explorer who travels to the unfathomably remote kingdom of Afghanistan and first befriends and then reluctantly betrays its wise and impeccably courteous Amir. But he is only one character in a cast that includes ladies and generals, princes and deserters, all brilliantly and sympathetically realized. At once stirring and harrowing, exotic and cautionary, and as vividly colored as a Persian miniature, the result is a tour de force of re-creation and invention.

Author : Edmund Richardson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2021-05-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9781526644374

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Alexandria by Edmund Richardson Pdf

'This is a jewel of a book' - SUNDAY TIMES 'One of the great stories of archaeology, exploration and espionage' - William Dalrymple 'Immensely enjoyable' - BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE ____________________________________ For centuries the city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains was a meeting point of East and West. Then it vanished. In 1833 it was discovered in Afghanistan by the unlikeliest person imaginable: Charles Masson, an ordinary working-class boy from London turned deserter, pilgrim, doctor, archaeologist and highly respected scholar. On the way into one of history's most extraordinary stories, Masson would take tea with kings, travel with holy men and become the master of a hundred disguises; he would see things no westerner had glimpsed before and few have glimpsed since. This is a wild journey through nineteenth-century India and Afghanistan, with impeccably researched storytelling that shows us a world of espionage and dreamers, ne'er-do-wells and opportunists, extreme violence both personal and military, and boundless hope. At the edge of empire, amid the deserts and the mountains, it is the story of an obsession passed down the centuries. 'Impressive ... Masson has at last found the intrepid biographer he has so long deserved' - John Keay

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 506 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 1843
Category : Afghan Wars
ISBN : UVA:X001617174

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Memorials of Affghanistan by Anonim Pdf

Author : in the Honourable East India Company's service Officer
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 82 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 1842
Category : Afghan Wars
ISBN : BL:A0024542788

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A Narrative of the Recent War in Affghanistan, Its Origin, Progress, and Prospects by in the Honourable East India Company's service Officer Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 879 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2018-09-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004359932

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Brill's Companion to the Reception of Alexander the Great by Anonim Pdf

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Alexander the Great has something for everyone who is interested in the life and afterlife of Alexander III of Macedon, the Great.

Author : Michael Jenkins
Publisher : Unbound Publishing
Page : 371 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2018-06-14
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781912618293

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The Failsafe Query by Michael Jenkins Pdf

The search is on..... The Failsafe Query is a gripping thriller set in the contemporary world of modern British espionage. Sean Richardson, a disgraced former intelligence agent, is tasked to lead a team to search for Alfie Chapman, an Intelligence officer on the cusp of exposing thousands of secrets to the media. This includes a long lost list of Russian moles embedded since the Cold War, one of whom remains a public favourite in the British parliamentary system. The action moves with absorbing pace and intrigue across Central Asia and Europe as the puzzle begins to unfold through a deep hidden legacy. Tense, fast paced, and insightful, The Failsafe Query twists and turns to a satisfyingly dramatic finale. Praise for the Failsafe Query 'Oh my goodness, what a really excellent book. Absolutely gripping, tense and thrilling. Such intrigue.' – Pigeonhole reviewer. 'A 'best of British' espionage thriller Set amid a modern day spy-world. This riveting book will have you on the edge of your seat taking you on a roller coaster ride of twists and turns.' – Goodreads reviewer. 'A thoroughly captivating book. Action packed with a very clever plot. I was hooked in the blink of an eye. Quite unputdownable!' – Pigeonhole reviewer. 'This is must read. A modern day thriller that I did not want to put down. The plot is fast and well thought through - completely gripping.' – Goodreads reviewer. 'Gathers momentum, and builds towards a terrific climax. Brilliant !' - Goodreads reviewer Also available in the Failsafe Thriller series: The Kompromat Kill - The deadly hunt for a Nizari spy ring