The scramble for Africa, that cynical carving up of the Dark Continent by European powers desperate for a place in the sun, has been told many times before and from every conceivable perspective. Frank McLynn, however, sets out to do something quite different; namely, to chart the age of exploration which immediately preceded that of Empire. For it was between 1840 and 1890 that men like Stanley, Livingstone and Burton first set foot in Africa and thrashed out the ideology which later became ‘imperialism’ in a series of ad hoc confrontations with natives, slave-owners and herds of stampeding rhino.

Literary Review

Aug 1992

Categories

Kathryn Hughes

The Swan of Odense Had a Taste for the Quality

Daughter of a Poet and of a Parallelogram

Women who Denounced their Sisters as Witches

What Life Held for a Clergyman’s Daughter

Diana Athill at Home

She is Editor of the Esteemed ‘Art Press’

She is a Dab Hand at Making Cookies

Now It Can Be Told

Unlikely Heroine

She Gave Him a Son, He Gave Her Syphilis

Seven Years’ War

Hasty Scrawls

Mad Cows & Englishman

History Ain’t What It Used to Be

Interview: Marina Warner

Biographical Fever

‘Have You Got Their Letters?”

Interview: Hilary Mantel

The Joy of Paperbacks

Can You Drop a Kindle in the Bath?

Festival Frolics

The Importance of Autumn

The Sense of a Binding