Emperor vanquished

Philip Marsden (Harper Press, £17.99)

The medieval kingdom that was Abyssinia in the middle of the 19th century witnessed an extraordinary campaign against the might of Queen Victoria's empire, some years before the holy war in the Sudan.

At the centre of this stirring story is King Theodore, a mad warlord in a mountain stronghold who had the audacity to clap the British consul and other envoys in chains, which - as with Gordon's later predicament in Khartoum - did not go down well with the Foreign Office.

Britain's no-quarter response was to send General Robert Napier and an 11,000-strong force from India to the "ancient half-forgotten kingdom" in an immense reprisal and rescue expedition that culminated in the storming of the king's fortress of Magdala.

The bizarre saga is brilliantly unfolded by Marsden, who knows Ethiopia well. Most importantly, he captures the fire and the fury of the whole project with Theodore and a giant mortar called "Sebastopol" at its crucible - a monarch steeped in the bloodshed of the native people, but who also abolished slavery. He claimed to be the "flail of the wicked" and strove to reduce the power of the church in his dominion.

Britain's only interest in the region was to strategically protect it from the French. However, the imprisonment of its subjects was an insult to the Crown that could not go unpunished and in the heyday of empire, equipped with rail track and locomotives to get from the coast to the mountain, this proved to be one of the greatest adventures in Victorian history. With such a tyrant as Theodore - and there are surely echoes of Iraq here - a massive effort was needed to defeat him. Marsden is more than equal to the task of painting this exotic episode in poetic colours. Colin Gardiner