the book shows its age: the guy is your prototype orientalist white scholar-cum-adventurer and no surprise some claims float around that Indiana Jones is based on this character. Thrill seeking, entitled, opinionated and racist AF yet the whole way through he manages to write well enough for me to feel I don’t want to put the book down. I keep thinking that if he gets himself killed when his disguise falls through, he’d bloody well deserved it for lack of respect to other cultures he claims to study, and yet I feel the tension each time he gets into a sticky situation. No indication at the end he paid his servants (enough) for what they had to put up with, or what happened to them when he returned to India!