This brilliantly readable work of history tells the bizarre story of the Ottoman Empire as seen through the lives of its extravagant and tyrannical sultans. With their absolute power, their love of pomp, and their overwhelming venality and corruption, rarely has a great empire been ruled by such grotesque and awesome figures. There was Suleiman the Magnificent, who allowed his wife to persuade him to murder his eldest son and his best friend; Murad III, who left 103 children behind him when he died; Mustafa, who was kept in a cage, attended by deaf-mutes, until he ascended to the throne. There were sultans who practiced their archery on living people; sultans who drowned the ladies of their harem by the score; and sultans who gave the reins of empire to their favorite eunuchs. For four hundred years, they fought wars, terrorized their subjects, made Turkey into a great empire, and then allowed her to decline into ostentatious and impotent decay.

“A splendid, exciting book” -Daily Mirror
“The story of the first all-out struggle in Asia between Communism and the West, vividly told in an exciting and engrossing book” -Sunday Express
Only three short years after the end of the Japanese occupation, war came again to Malaya. The Chinese-backed guerrillas called it the War of the Running Dogs-their contemptuous term for those in Malaya who remained loyal to the British. The British Government referred to this bloody and costly struggle as the ‘Malayan Emergency’. Yet it was a war that lasted twelve years and cost thousands of lives. By the time it was over Malaya had obtained its independence-but on British, not on Chinese or Communist terms.
Here is the war as it was. Here are the planters and their wives on their remote rubber estates, the policemen, the generals and the soldiers, the Malays, Chinese and Indians of a polyglot country, all fighting an astute, ruthless, and well-organized enemy.