A Modern De Quincey

<p>Captain Robinson completing a posting as a young British administrator in remote northern Burma returned to Mandalay in 1923 to await a new assignment. One evening Robinson and two friends came upon an opium den. While his friends called it a night Robinson stayed on to sample the forbidden pleasures within—a decision that was to alter his life forever. Thus commences an incredible autobiographical account of the seduction of a naive young romantic by the temptations of the East and of his eventual narrow escape from death. First published in 1942 the book has become a sought-after rarity among British colonial accounts now republished with a new foreword by Gerry Abbott.</p>