Snake and Sword

A boy grows up in an Indian cantonment with an inherited terror of snakes that nobody will explain to him, and goes into the army knowing the thing is waiting. Percival Christopher Wren served in India and wrote Beau Geste afterwards; the barrack detail here is first-hand. It is a study of fear treated as an illness rather than a weakness. Fifty-eight plates of Anglo-Indian life by painters including Edwin Lord Weeks and Thomas Jones Barker, from hunts and street markets to Windsor audiences, picture the imperial world that shaped the boy.