William Hamilton-Dalrymple

The Sweet Name of Parkyns

The Gentleman Savage: A Life of Mansfield Parkyns

By

Century 176pp £16.95 order from our bookshop

In the early summer of 1845 three undergraduates from Trinity College, Cambridge stood outside a gin shop in Khartoum. They had arrived after a five hundred mile journey by camel across the desert from Aswan, directed there in order to meet another Englishman. One of them described the scene: ‘We knocked and walked in. There in front of us was the most magnificent physique of a man I have ever seen, half dressed in Arnaout costume, looking quite wild. He introduced us to the greatest scoundrels that I think could be found anywhere in a room, men too rascally for the Levant or even Cairo – slave dealers, outlaws and I know not what else.’

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    Follow Us