Allenby: making the modern Middle East

Edward Henry Hynman Allenby was born in 1861 in Brackenhurst, Nottinghamshire in comfortable circumstances – a Victorian squire perhaps destined to help govern the British Empire on behalf of the Queen-Empress.

Yet he failed his civil service exams and instead enrolled at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, evolving several decades later into the legendary conqueror of Jerusalem and securing the Holy Land for the British Crown.

The author of this detailed book about the man who became Viscount Allenby of Felixstowe and Megiddo describes how he routed the Turks with ‘a withering and pulverising carpet of steel’ – an unrelenting bombardment first tested, albeit unsuccessfully, at the Battle of the Somme.