This book, first published in 1973, gives a vivid picture of British-Indian social life from the eighteenth century to Independence, as well as of the houses themselves. The Government Houses were not only buildings on a palatial scale, but were also a background to a way of life that was as full of contrasts as the Raj itself. The author peoples the houses with some of the men and women who lived in them during the course of their history, and in doing so provides a chapter of social history which has not been written before.

Palaces of the Raj;: Magnificence and misery of the Lord Sahibs

History

BENCE-JONES, MARK

Asia

Allen And Unwin

Clive of India

St.Martin's Press

The British aristocracy

Politics & Social Sciences

MONTGOMERY-MASSINGBERD, Hugh

Social Sciences

Constable

Recounts England's rule of India from the Mutiny in 1858, when England took over for the East India Company, until 1947, when Lord Mountbatten oversaw the transfer of power

The viceroys of India

<p>The old land-owning families of Ireland, known collectively as the Ascendancy long after they had ceased to be in the ascendant, lost most of their political power towards the end of the 1870s, the same time as their economic foundations began to be sapped by agrarian unrest. For them the hundred years that followed was a twilight period; yet despite the shortage of money and the break-up of their ancestral homes and estates, not to mention two World Wars and the Irish Troubles, they still managed to enjoy life. This book is a highly entertaining chronicle of the Ascendancy's twilight years; a chronicle rich in anecdote with memorable scenes in fast-moving narrative. The mood is constantly changing from comedy to tragedy and back again. Country houses are seen in all the glory of a royal visit; they are seen burning during the Troubles and Civil War; they are seen in the last stages of dry rot, inhabited by a solitary old lady who keeps body and soul together by selling off the contents of her drawing room. A hundred years of the Ascendancy world, from the Victorian heyday of the Viceregal Court at Dublin Castle to the 1960s when Dior and dogs' dinners went hand in hand, is portrayed in fascinating detail - the world of George Moore, Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane. Most of these writers feature in "Twilight of the Ascendancy", along with a host of other characters, serious, eccentric, pleasure-loving, tragic, ranging from the philanthropic Horace Plunkett to the rider, yachtsman and pioneer motorist Sir Hercules Langrishe; from Lord Castletown who was a Druid and believed in fairies to Lady Fingall who on hunting mornings used to sit in her bath wearing her top hat and veil. They may have been 'a doomed aristocracy', as the novelist George A. Birmingham called them; but they were, in the words of Yeats - who appears more than once in this book -'no petty people'.</p>

Twilight of the ascendancy

In 1858, the then Governor-General, Lord Canning, was given the more romantic title of Viceroy. This is a book about the Viceroys from 'Clemency' Canning to Mountbatten; about the men who held an office which, in its combination of responsibility and splendour, is without parallel in modern history. They include figures as diverse as the craggy John Lawrence and the charming and urbane Dufferin; the dynamic Mayo and the wayward Lytton; the humble, high-minded Ripon and the brilliant overbearing Curzon; the patrician Lansdowne and the self-made lawyer Reading. All are vividly portrayed against the background of their times in India; much use being made of contemporary letters - many of them unpublished - in order that they may be seen through the eyes of their colleagues and subordinates.The book is not just about the Viceroys themselves, but also about their wives; ranging from the beautiful and tragic Lady Canning to the redoubtable Lady Willingdon. It is by no means confined to affairs of state, but gives a lively and nostalgic picture of the ceremonial and social side of Viceregal life over the course of a century; of the delights and discomforts of reigning in the Government Houses of Calcutta, Simla and Delhi, surrounded by a retinue of secretaries and ADCs, a bodyguard and an army of scarlet-clad servants; of Viceregal progresses by sedan-chair, elephant, houseboat, bullock-cart, railway-train and Dakota.  Although certain Viceroys appear in this book in a none too flattering light, the overall picture is of a series of rulers on the whole well suited to their high office; in which some achieved greatness and most of them success. And while the Viceroys of India now tend to be associated in peoples' minds with the most true-blue sort of British imperialism, this book shows them to have been almost without exception men of liberal and often unconventional views, who though they ruled on behalf of Britain saw their first duty as being to the Indians.

Viceroys of India

Constable Co

Clive of India (Biography and Memoirs)

Biographies & Memoirs

Think Publishing

<p>Revised edition, In excellent condition, Very light shelf wear</p>

A Guide to Irish Country Houses

Travel

Europe

Constable & Robinson Ltd.

Portrait of the Ascendancy covers the hundred years of Irish history from 1870 - 1970. It contains memoirs and unpublished papers and diaries from ordinary members of a class that are often overlooked in political histories preoccupied with the personalities and activities of leading figures.

The Catholic Families

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