"We are fortunate in having this minute compilation of cowboy lore." — Library Journal"Quite likely the best book of its kind to appear . . . written by a veteran cowboy in colorful but explicit prose, and providing just about as complete a cow country manual as you could want. . . . A greenhorn could almost set up ranching by absorbing Mr. Fay's lore, and western fans will find this book a treasure-house of information." — Springfield RepublicanA self-descr...

Before the myth took over, there was the work. Long before Hollywood dressed the cowboy in cinematic glory and romanticized his silhouette against a painted sunset, there was a man on horseback doing one of the most physically demanding, technically complex, and relentlessly unforgiving jobs the American frontier ever produced. This remarkable volume strips away every layer of legend and gets down to the raw, gritty, beautifully honest truth of what it actually meant to be a cowboy, not in...

This book tells the fascinating story of the war between England and China that delivered Hong Kong to the English, forced the imperial Chinese government to add four ports to Canton as places in which foreigners could live and trade, and rendered irreversible the process that for almost a century thereafter distinguished western relations with this quarter of the globe—the process that is loosely termed the "opening of China."Originally published by UNC Press in 1975, Peter Ward Fa...

The last days of the Raj bring to mind Gandhi's nonviolence and Nehru's diplomacy. These associations obscure another reality: that an army of Indian men and women who tried to throw the British off the subcontinent. The Forgotten Army brings to life for the first time the story of how Subhas Chandra Bose, a charismatic Bengali, attempted to liberate India with an army of former British Indian soldiers -- the Indian National Army (INA). The story begins with the British Indian Army fightin...

This book tells the fascinating story of the war between England and China that delivered Hong Kong to the English, forced the imperial Chinese government to add four ports to Canton as places in which foreigners could live and trade, and rendered irreversible the process that for almost a century thereafter distinguished western relations with this quarter of the globe — the process that is loosely termed the “opening of China.”Originally published by UNC Press in 1975, Peter Ward ...

‘A gripping read as well as an important one’ – Rana Mitter, The GuardianIn The Opium War, professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature Julia Lovell offers a compelling account of the causes and fallout of the Opium Wars.In October 1839, Britain entered the first Opium War with China. Its brutality notwithstanding, the conflict was also threaded with tragicomedy: with Victorian hypocrisy, bureaucratic fumbli...

Little is known and much less has been written about the Malayan theatre of operations of SOE from 1942-45. In this, his second book, Ian Trenowden, working closely with the wartime commander of Force 136, Group B, has built up a surprisingly complete picture of those operations and traces the evolution of the local SOE headquarters from a single desk in London’s Baker Street to the independent Ceylon HQ which, by the end of the war had put a total of 400 British officers and other ranks i...

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. The black sign, painted in white letters that hangs upon the gates, reads:Opens at NightfallCloses at DawnAs the sun disappears beyond the horizon, all over the tents small lights begin to flicker, as though the entirety of the circus is covered in particularly bright fireflies. When the tents are all aglow, sparkling against the night sk...

No other land has captured man's imagination quite like Tibet. Hidden away behind the highest mountains on earth, and ruled over by a mysterious God-king, it was for centuries a land forbidden to all outsiders.In this remarkable and ultimately tragic narrative, Peter Hopkirk recounts the forcible opening up of this medieval Buddhist kingdom by inquisitive Western travellers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the race to reach Lhasa, Tibet's sacred capital.Th...

Britain's precipitous and ill-planned disengagement from India in 1947--condemned as a "shameful flight" by Winston Churchill--had a truly catastrophic effect on South Asia, leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead in its wake and creating a legacy of chaos, hatred, and war that has lasted over half a century. Ranging from the fall of Singapore in 1942 to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, Shameful Flight provides a vivid behind-the-scenes look at Britain's decision ...

The Gurkhas have fought on behalf of Britain and India for nearly two hundred years. As brave as they are resilient, resourceful and cunning, they have earned a reputation as devastating fighters, and their unswerving loyalty to the Crown has always inspired affection in the British people. There are also now up to 40,000 Gurkhas in the million-strong army of modern India.But who are the Gurkhas? How much of the myth that surrounds them is true? Award-winning historian Chris Bellam...

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys of the East India Company's army on 10 May 1857, in the town of Meerut, and soon escalated into other mutinies and civilian rebellions largely in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, with the major hostilities confined to present-day Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, northern Madhya Pradesh, and the Delhi region. The rebellion posed a considerable threat to Company power in that region, and was contained only with the fall of Gwalior on 2...