Böcker av Maurice Collis

Changing Steps is a rites of passage story. The main character, Gareth Adams, delays going to University and his plans to go overseas fail. He finds himself in an office job where he becomes embroiled in office politics and discovers that these can be places of great joy, companionship and achievement but also places where jealousy and meanness live. He grows in confidence in his personal life, but simultaneously his relationships with his girlfriends are complicated and sometimes lead to disaster. At the end of the book we see him finding some stability in his life but also sacrifice. Gareth's further journey will be told in a series of books.

Another enduring work by the brilliant historian Maurice Collis. First published in 1946 and long out of print, Foreign Mud is a marvelous historical reconstruction of the events surrounding the illegal trade of opium in Canton during the 1830s and the Opium Wars between Britain and China that followed. Based largely on voluminous documents written by British doctors, missionaries, merchants, and government officials, Collis's tale, far from being a dry assemblage of dates and facts, is a fascinating example of twentieth-century Orientalist literature: "...you must picture the broad river puckered with little waves, the green sweep of the rice, on the horizon blue hills; you must conjure the many sorts of passing craft, the Mandarin house-boats, dainty and lacquered, the streamers and lanterns of passenger boats, the high tilted junks with demon-painted sterns; and you must plunge these images into a light more intense than we know in these countries, into a warmer wind and an air, purer and more scented than we can sniff except in dreams." Collis describes, in all its complexities, a moment in time when China is forced, after more than two thousand years of self-contained sufficiency, to open its doors to the culture, commerce, and evangelization of the Westthe casus belli, foreign mud: the opium the British grew and shipped from India. Interspersed with various maps, plans, and illustrations, Foreign Mud is a historical narrative the reader will find more entertaining than any Spielberg film.

The book commences in India at the time of Britain's domination of the World Indigo market in the late 1800s. A series of incidents during that period have repercussions throughout the years that follow.

"e;This is an unpretentious book, but it brings out with unusual clearness the dilemma that faces every official in an empire like our own."e; George OrwellTrials in Burma recounts Maurice Collis' experiences as a district magistrate in Rangoon in the late 1920s. The book recounts his gradual realisation that far from administering an impartial system of justice, he is expected to protect British interests. In a cool dispassionate style, Collis describes how, by choosing integrity over career, he eventually loses his job."e;A brilliant, direct and extraordinarily vivid account of this troubled period...a masterly survey of the Burmese scene."e; Daily Mail

Foremost among the biographies that Maurice Collis wrote during his wide-ranging literary career is Siamese White - an account of the career of Samuel White of Bath who, during the reign of James II, was appointed by the King of Siam as a mandarin of that country.

This account of the struggle between the British and Chinese in the Opium War in Canton in the 1830s has a vividness that comes from 20 years of experience in the Far East as a civil servant. 'The story of the Opium War does not lend itself to natural composition;

Landing on the Mexican coast on Good Friday, 1519, Hernán Cortés felthimself the bearer of a divine burden to conquer and convert the firstadvanced civilization Europeans had yet encountered in the West. ForMontezuma, leader of the Mexicans, April 21, 1519 (known in theirsophisticated astronomical system as 9 Wind Day) was the precise date ofa dire prophesy: the return of Quetzalcoatl, a fearsome god predictedto arrive by ship, from the East, with light skin, a black beard, robedin black-exactly as Cortés would. The ensuing drama is described byeminent historian Maurice Collis in a style that is equal parts storyand scholarship. Though its consequences have been treated by writers asdiverse as D.H. Lawrence and Charles Olson, never before have the factsof this event been rendered with such extraordinary clarity andelegance.