Butcher & bolt : Two hundred years of foreign engagement in Afghanistan / David Loyn.

Includes bibliography—(p. 324-330).

Maps on lining papers.

Summary: “Afghanistan has been a strategic prize for foreign empires for more than 200 years. The British, Russians and Americans have all fought across its beautiful and inhospitable terrain, in conflicts variously ruthless, misguided and bloody. By the 1890s, the common sneer about how British soldiers treated Afghan tribesmen was that they would ‘butcher’ them, then ‘bolt’.

This violent history – coming right up to date, with the Taliban today – is the subject of David Loyn’s magisterial book. It begins with the first British mission exactly 200 years ago – the bizarre, almost medieval progress of Mountstuart Elphinstone, who probed west beyond the known boundaries of British India to find the Amir of Afghanistan clad in an emerald breastplate, wearing the Koh-i-noor diamond”.