The Ultimate Imperial Adventure

Khartoum

The wonderful, powerful story of one of the most important and exciting campaigns in Victorian history, from the publishers of Zulu and Hell Riders.

Michael Asher has served in the Parachute Regiment and the SAS Regiment. The author of twenty-four books and presenter of six TV documentaries, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1996. For his writing and travels, he has been awarded the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal, the Mungo Park Medal and the Ness Award.  He lives in Nairobi, Kenya.

The British campaign in the Sudan in Queen Victoria's reign is an epic tale of adventure more thrilling than any fiction. The story begins with the massacre of the 11,000 strong Hicks Pasha column in 1883. Sent to evacuate the country, British hero General Gordon was surrounded and murdered in Khartoum by an army of dervishes led by the Mahdi. The relief mission arrived 2 days too late. The result was a national scandal that shocked the Queen and led to the fall of the British government. 
 
 
Twelve years later it was the brilliant Herbert Kitchener who struck back. Achieving the impossible he built a railway across the desert to transport his troops to the final devastating confrontation at Omdurman in 1898. 
 
 
Desert explorer and author Michael Asher has reconstructed this classic tale in vivid detail. Having covered every inch of the ground and examined all eyewitness reports, he brings to bear new evidence questioning several accepted aspects of the story. The result is an account that sheds new light on the most riveting tale of honour, courage, revenge and savagery of late Victorian times.

The Uncrowned King of Arabia

Lawrence

'The best life of Lawrence yet published' - The Express 
 
Lawrence was a brilliant propagandist, rhetorician and manipulator, who deliberately turned his life into a conundrum. But who was the real man behind the masks? Lawrence began the GreatWar as a map-clerk and ended it as one of the greatest military heroes of the 20th century. He altered the face of the Middle East, helped to lead the Arabs to freedom and formulated modern guerilla warfare. Yet he refused any honours and spent therest of his life in near obscurity. Desert explorer and Arabist, Michael Asher, set out to solve this riddle and discovers a hero whose greatness owed as much to his weaknesses as to his strengths.

Michael Asher

Compelling and definitive . . . will surely not be bettered

Detailed, scathingly honest. Asher has brought the critical eye of the knowledgeable insider to his in-depth study of SAS operations and personalities

Breathtaking bravery, astonishing feats of endurance, raids and battles described with terrific immediacy and pace

The Definitive Story of the SAS

On 4 May 1980, seven terrorists holding twenty-one people captive in the Iranian Embassy in London's Prince's Gate, executed their first hostage. They threatened to kill another hostage every thirty minutes until their demands were met. Minutes later, armed men in black overalls and balaclavas shimmied down the roof on ropes and burst in through windows and doors. In seconds all but one of the terrorists had been shot dead, the other captured. 
 
 For most people, this was their first acquaintance with a unit that was soon to become the ideal of modern military excellence - the Special Air Service regiment. Few realized that the SAS had been in existence for almost forty years, playing a discreet, if not secret, role almost everywhere Britain had fought since World War II, and had been the prototype of all modern special forces units throughout the world. 
 
 In The Regiment, Michael Asher - a former soldier in 23 SAS Regiment - examines the evolution of the special forces idea and investigates the real story behind the greatest military legend of the late twentieth century.

Michael Asher

Praise for The Regiment

Compelling and definitive . . . will surely not be bettered

Detailed, scathingly honest. Asher has brought the critical eye of the knowledgeable insider to his in-depth study of SAS operations and personalities

Breathtaking bravery, astonishing feats of endurance, raids and battles described with terrific immediacy and pace

Compelling and definitive . . . will surely not be bettered

Detailed, scathingly honest. Asher has brought the critical eye of the knowledgeable insider to his in-depth study of SAS operations and personalities

Breathtaking bravery, astonishing feats of endurance, raids and battles described with terrific immediacy and pace

Compelling and definitive . . . will surely not be bettered

Detailed, scathingly honest. Asher has brought the critical eye of the knowledgeable insider to his in-depth study of SAS operations and personalities

Breathtaking bravery, astonishing feats of endurance, raids and battles described with terrific immediacy and pace

Books by Michael Asher

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