Tidrick Kathryn Libri

Throughout his long and turbulent career as an Indian leader, first in South Africa and then in India, Gandhi sought to fulfill his religious aspirations through politics, and to reconcile politics with his private religious discipline. The Gandhi revealed here is not the secular saint of popular renown, but a difficult and self-obsessed man driven by a sense of unique personal destiny. Penetrating and provocative, Tidrick draws on material previously ignored by Gandhi's biographers and explores the paradoxes within his life and beliefs. Did the nationalist leader truly believe that he was not just fighting for Indian independence but also global enlightenment? Gandhi never admitted his early influences and experiences, but how important were the more esoteric ideas he first encountered in the West?

Kathryn Tidrick's highly acclaimed book explores the origins of the ideal of British imperial rule and the effect it had on the character of the English ruling classes. From the Lawrence brothers of the Punjab, Rajah James Brooke of Sarawak and Mountbatten to Frederick Courtenay Selous, Elspeth Huxley and Cecil Rhodes, Tidrick illuminates some of the extraordinary lives and actions of the people that formed and governed the British Empire, from India to Africa and beyond.