This book concerned the life of Duleep Singh, the last Maharajah of the Sikh Empire. It all started out so fascinating. A secret bank box in Switzerland, the princess who kept it, the Koh-I-Noor diamond, and the race to get back a lost Sikh throne. No question, the first few chapters held my interest and had me wanting more. However, the more I read, the more bored I became. Lots of back and forth, lots of things that had nothing to do with the bank box in question, lots of complaining by Duleep Singh. Without a doubt, he was ill-treated by the British government. Tricked into signing away his kingdom and giving up his most prized possession, he had every right to be angry. I just got tired of reading about it for 300-plus pages. Oh, and the ending was a complete let down.

This book could've been so much more. Of worthy note are the parts that deal with Singh and his family life. ( )

This book is the sort of book that makes me glad I'm a reader. Campbell takes you into a fascinating period of British history, the time of the Raj, when Queen Victoria was the Empress of India. Britain doesn't come out looking to good in this account, which is appropriate. Taking advantage of political upheaval in the Punjab, the queen's government manipulates the kingdom away from its eleven-year-old king, Maharajah Duleep Singh, including the Koh-i-noor diamond. But that's okay because the young king grows up to become a real thorn in Britain's flesh. As an adult, he is a sad figure, trying to get a public hearing on the wrong's done him as a child-king and allowing himself to become a pawn in the complex play for power that was Europe in the late 19th century. Who knew? I certainly didn't! In history, compelling stories abound, and this is one of them. ( )

This is a fun book. It doesn't really address anything important, but it's an examination of one of the odd sidelights of history.

To begin with, the Maharajah of the title is Duleep Singh. I first met him as the young ruler of the Punjab in George Macdonald Frasier's book, "Flashman and the Mountain of Light." (Incidentally, Frasier's books are proof that truth is always stranger than fiction. Every time I have gone digging into the background for his novels, I have found that the really amazing, unbelievable stuff was true, and that sometimes, in fact, he made it less bizarre than it was, just for narrative versimilitude.) So, anyway, Duleep Singh.

This book basically looks at what happened to him after the British invaded his country and took him and the Koh i Noor to England. He was fine, if a bit wild, until middle age, when in a mid-life crisis to serve as a model to others, he ran off to Russia disguised as an Irish terrorist (a man who used the then-new invention of dynamite to blow up English targets) and tried to re-establish his old kingdom, accompanied by a pair of Spaniels and a Cockney dancing girl. Really. ( )