Raffles: And the Golden Opportunity - Hardcover

Victoria Glendinning

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846686032 ISBN 13: 9781846686030

Publisher: Profile Books, 2012

Synopsis

This is the first biography in decades of the 'Father of Singapore'. Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) was the charismatic and persuasive founder of Singapore and Governor of Java. An English adventurer, disobedient employee of the East India Company, utopian imperialist, linguist, zoologist and civil servant, he carved an extraordinary (though brief) life for himself in South East Asia. The tropical, disease-ridden settings of his story are as dramatic as his own trajectory - an obscure young man with no advantages other than talent and obsessive drive, who changed history by establishing - without authority - on the wretchedly unpromising island of Singapore, a settlement which has become a world city. After a turbulent time in the East Indies, Raffles returned to the UK and turned to his other great interests - botany and zoology. He founded London Zoo in 1825, a year before his death. Raffles remains a controversial figure, and in the first biography for over forty years, Victoria Glendinning charts his prodigious rise within the social and historical contexts of his world. His domestic and personal life was vivid and shot through with tragedy. His own end was sad, though his fame immortal.

About this title

About the Author:

Victoria Glendinning is a prizewinning biographer, the author of Elizabeth Bowen, Vita, Edith Sitwell, Trollope and Leonard Woolf. She has also written three novels, The Grown-Ups, Electricity and Flight. She is a Vice-President of English PEN an fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Yorkshire, she now lives in Somerset.

About this edition

• Publisher: Profile Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1846686032
• ISBN 13: 9781846686030
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352