Böcker av Charles Allen

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Few themes in history have had as strong a hold on people's imagination. Fewer still have managed to alter the course of civilization. This is Charles Allen's definitive account of the Aryans, offering a grand sweep of language, mythology, contested histories and conflict. Spanning continents, cultures and societies: from the Russian steppe to the Indus valley, the Iliad to the Mahabharata, Greek to Sanskrit, Putin to Trump, and Müller to Vivekananda, Aryans astonishes with its scope. Allen, true to a style that has endeared him to a legion of admirers, weaves a narrative that is startling and illuminating. The product of a great investigation and meticulous scholarship, Aryans, Allen's last book, is his crowning achievement and marks the end of an illustrious career.

Ashoka is known for his contribution to the spread of Buddhism. His positive impact on the world still felt today, here in a wide-ranging, multi-layered journey of discovery that is as fascinating as any detective story. Charles Allen tells the story of the man who was arguably the greatest ruler India has ever known. This incredible journey takes one through the Greek empire to all corners of Indian subcontinent including the Indus Valley. One meets the emperors Alexander, Chandragupta, Harsha, the Gupta and the Satavahanas. At times, the Chinese traveller huen tsang (xuanzang) and FA hien direct the discovery and at times one gets clues from Pali scriptures from Sri Lanka. Along the way, one also meets the gifted Chanakya as well as great men like Bhandarkar, Nehru and Ambedkar. Br>oriental scholars such as Alexander Cunningham, William Jones, James prinsep are the true heroes of this tale of discovery. Dr Dhananjay Chavan has translated the book into Marathi aided by extensive correspondence with the author.

Our earth, our world lies between two realms. Gaia is our Mother Earth and to the other side we have our Egun (egg-un) the Middle Earth. The spirits of our ancestors. For eons Mother Earth and Middle Earth exchanged harmony. The two realms bore children on both sides.The daughters of Gaia were not prepared. Generations of them have guarded the secrets of Mother Earth. The secrets they guarded gave them mystical energy and angelic gifts. Now their lives are threatened and only one thing can prevent what was inevitable. They did not have the ability to stop it. Traverse through time and the birth of a child that would have the combined gifts of all of them. Find out why and how this young girl became so remarkable in reuniting the two realms.How she became Crystal.

India's lost emperor Ashoka Maurya has a special place in history. In his quest to govern India by moral force alone he turned Buddhism from a minor sect into a world religion, and set up a new yardstick for government. But Ashoka's bold experiment ended in tragedy and he was forgotten for almost two thousand years.In this beautifully written, multi-layered journey Charles Allen describes how fragments of the Ashokan story were gradually discovered, pieced together by a variety of British Orientalists: antiquarians, archaeologists and epigraphists. In doing so, they did much to recover India's ancient history itself. The Lost Emperor tells the story of the man who was arguably the greatest ruler India has ever known.

Throughout the East there runs a legend of a great mountain at the centre of the world, where four rivers have their source. Charles Allen traces this legend to Western Tibet where there stands Kailas, worshipped by Hindus and Buddhists alike as the home of their gods and the navel of the world. Close by are the sources of four mighty rivers: the sacred Ganges, the Indus, the Sutlej and Tsangpo-Brahmaputra.For centuries Kailas remained an enigma to the outside world. Then a succession of remarkable men took up the challenge of penetrating the hostile, frozen wastelands beyond the Western Himalayas, culminating in the great age of discovery, the final years of the Victorian era.A Mountain in Tibet is an extraordinary story of exploration and high adventure, full of the excitement and colour expected from the author of Plain Tales from the Raj.

This text retells the story of a brotherhood of young men who together laid claim to one of the most notorious frontiers in the world: India's north-west frontier, which in the late 1990s forms the volatile boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Known collectively as Henry Lawrence's Young Men, each had distinguished himself in the East India Company's wars in the Punjab in the 1840s before going out to carve out names for themselves as politicals on the frontier.Drawing extensively on the men's diaries, journals and letters, Charles Allen weaves the individual stories of these Soldier Sahibs together with the tale of how they came together to save British India, ending climatically on Delhi Ridge in 1857.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent his early years there, before being sent, aged six, to England, a desperately unhappy experience. Charles Allen's great-grandfather brought the sixteen-year-old Kipling out to Lahore to work on The Civil and Military Gazette with the words 'Kipling will do', and thus set young Rudyard on his literary course. And so it was that at the start of the cold weather of 1882 he stepped ashore at Bombay on 18 October 1882 - 'a prince entering his kingdom'. He stayed for seven years during which he wrote the work that established him as a popular and critical, sometimes controversial, success. Charles Allen has written a brilliant account of those years - of an Indian childhood and coming of age, of abandonment in England, of family and Empire. He traces the Indian experiences of Kipling's parents, Lockwood and Alice and reveals what kind of culture the young writer was born into and then returned to when still a teenager. It is a work of fantastic sympathy for a man - though not blind to Kipling's failings - and the country he loved.

A fascinating history of the religious fanatics that would come to be known as the founding fathers of Islamic terrorism and who set down the intellectual roots of Al Queda.

Today there are many Buddhists in the West, but for 2000 years the Buddha's teachings were unknown outside Asia. It was not until the late 18th century, when Sir William Oriental Jones, a British judge in India, broke through the Brahmin's prohibition on learning their sacred language. Sanskrit, that clues about the origins of a religion quite distinct from Hinduism began to be deciphered from inscriptions on pillars and rocks.This study tells the story of the search that followed, as evidence mounted that countries as diverse as Ceylon, Japan and Tibet shared a religion which had its origins in India yet was unknown there. British rule brought to India, Burma and Ceylon a whole band of enthusiastic Orientalist amateurs - soldiers, administrators and adventurers - intent on investigating the subcontinent's lost past. Unwittingly, these men helped lay the foundations for the revival of Buddhism in Asia during the 19th century and its spread to the West in the 20th. Charles Allen's book is a mixture of detective work and story-telling, as this acknowledged master of British Indian history pieces together early Buddhist history to bring a handful of extraoridinary characters to life.

The idea of a hidden refuge, a paradise far from the stresses of modern life, has universal appeal. In 1932 the writer James Hilton coined the word 'Shangri-La' to describe such a place, when he gave that name to a hidden valley in the Himalayas in his novel LOST HORIZON.In THE SEARCH FOR SHANGRI-LA acclaimed traveller and writer Charles Allen explores the myth behind the story. He tracks down the sources that Hilton drew upon in writing his popular romance, and then sets out to discover what lies behind the legend that inspired him. In the course of a lively and amusing account of his four journeys into Tibet, Allen also gives us a controversial new reading of the country's early history, shattering our notions of Tibet as a Buddhist paradise and restoring the mysterious pre-Buddhist religion of Bon to its rightful place in Tibetan culture. He also locates the lost kingdom of Shang-shung and, in doing so, the original Shangri-La itself: in an astounding gorge beyond the Himalayas, full of extraordinary ruins.

This work chronicles the adventures of the last generation of British men and women who went East to seek their fortunes. Drawn into the colonial territories scattered around the South China Sea, they found themselves in an exotic, intoxicating world. It was a land of rickshaws and shanghai jars, sampans and Straits Steamers, set against a background of palm-fringed beaches and tropical rain-forests. But it was also a world of conflicting beliefs and many races, where the overlapping of widely differing moral standards and viewpoints created a heady and dangerous atmosphere.

The Raj was, for two hundred years, the jewel in the British imperial crown. Although founded on military expansionism and undoubted exploitation, it developed over the centuries into what has been called 'benign autocracy' - the government of many by few, with the active collaboration of most Indians in recognition of a desire for the advancement of their country.Charles Allen's classic oral history of the period that marked the end of British rule was first published a generation ago. Now reissued as the imperial century closes, this brilliantly insightful and bestselling collection of reminiscences illustrates the unique experience of British India: the sadness and luxury for some; the joy and deprivation for others.