Imperial Vanities: The Adventures of the Baker Brothers and Gordon of Khartoum

A true story of empire set in the Crimea, Sudan, Ceylon and Egypt – beautifully written and shot through with real psychological and historical insight.'Victorian Britain, that seemingly most conformist of ages, was in fact teeming with eccentrics. The fabulous Baker Brothers were eccentric in a conformist way for the time: Sir Samuel searched for the source of the Nile; Baker Pasha became leader of the Ottoman army. But it was that epitome of empire, and epitome of the Christian English gentleman, who was the most peculiar of them all: 'Chinese' Gordon is finally depicted as the anarchist he really was as he marched to his death against the Mahdi. It is Thompson's triump…