Word: clive
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...CLIVE OF PLASSEY -A. Mervyn Davies - Scribner ($3.75). Most people remember Robert, Lord Clive as a figure in Henty's With Clive In India. There was little else to read about him until last week A. Mervyn Davies, onetime British diplomat and author of Warren Hastings filled the gap with a solid, non-spark, thoroughly readable, 522-page biography, Clive of Plassey...
When Robert Clive reached Madras one nightfall in 1744 after a 15-month voyage from London, he found India a "battered caravanserai." Its warring kinglets misruled some 90 distinct peoples whose languages were Babel. Its climate was hotter than its curry. Its diseases were "consumptions, fluxes, fevers, cholera, scurvy, berbers (a kind of paralysis), smallpox, gout, the stone, prickly heat, tetters or worms...
...Clive rose from a penniless, friendless and unfriendly clerk of the East India Company to a military hero. Arcot and Plassey were his smashing victories. At Arcot, Clive's little army of 500 defeated an opposing army of 10,000. At Plassey, Clive's 3,200 men routed 50,000. William Pitt described him in Parliament as "the heaven-born general...
Author Davies rates Clive's military audacity higher than his strategy, denies that Plassey was the decisive battle many have called it. He does not deny Clive repaid himself handsomely for his trouble. First fruits of Plassey for Clive were $1,170,000. Clive's fortune when he returned to England shortly after was estimated at $6,000,000, one of the largest in the country. His wife's jewels were valued at $100,000 "at the very least." One Indian prince granted Clive $150,000 a year. Said witty Horace Walpole: "If a beggar asks charity...
...full staff over Hollywood. His main service in this cinema is to hike young John Randolph (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) out of a cankerous apathy toward the imperial sun ("Let it set. It's about time it did") and into the Colonial service with his brother Clive (Basil Rathbone...