Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

Review Twigger's book on the history of the river Nile is one of the those unexpected great reads... This is a non-fiction book that reads like a great, page-turning novel. ― CATHOLIC HERALD Red Nile is a scintillatingly colourful account of a river and a region that explorer/adventurer Twigger knows well... probably the author's magnum opus. ― SUNDAY TIMES Red Nile by Robert Twigger is how history should be written and taught. The reader is taken on a sweeping journey through the endless story of the Nile, where so much began and so much is still happening. -- Robin Hanbury-Tenison ― COUNTRY LIFE gives great insight into a place where the growth of civilisation is so closely lined to the power of nature. ― GOOD BOOK GUIDE This torrent of tales sweeps up everything from hippos (the Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar kept four Nile hippos at his mansion in Medell�n) to erotic papyrus. ― The Daily Telegraph Robert Twigger's ambitious biography of the Nile is an unexpected triumph...a scintillatingly colourful account of a river and a region Twigger knows intimately...an elegiac moving book...hugely entertaining...probably the author's magnum opus -- James McConnachie ― THE SUNDAY TIMES a tour de force; a brilliantly written scrapbook of history and travel, geography and science, myth and legend both ancient and modern... Twigger allows the river's ever changing shape to inform this engrossing biography. It's a vast subject but he never becomes overwhelmed by the material and has written an elegant, amusing and fascinating book, buoyed by his own enthusiasm, that draws you along in its current -- Carl Wilkinson ― FINANCIAL TIMES Like the vast, fast-flowing river itself with its waters teeming with crocodiles, hippopotami and bilharzia, so Red Nile teems with arcane facts and high spirited asides... Red Nile provides a feast of quirky, fascinating bits of knowledge, both funny and memorable -- Caroline Moorehead ― THE SPECTATOR Crocodiles, dams, feluccas, pharaohs and papyrus, disputation about sources, literary and riverine, myths and realities of fecundity: only someone as crazy as Robert Twigger would attempt to tell the whole story of the Nile from soup to nuts, yet in Red Nile that's exactly what he has done, filtering the vast flood of his subject matter through an infectious individual style -- Giles Foden ― CONDE NAST TRAVELLER Using the physical presence of the river, the tumultuous recent events that have occurred along it and his own experiences... Twigger succeeds in capturing the key features of Africa's greatest river: that it is wide-reaching as it is long, touches every era of human history, from nobility to the baseless violence that has so often stained the waters red -- Anthony Sattin ― THE SUNDAY TIMES the Nile's own source has always been mysterious - in the Ethiopian highlands of in the Kagera River, which flows into Lake Victoria and on into the Nile proper, or in Lake Tanganyika? This is one of the previously unanswered questions tackled by Robert Twigger in this impressive book - a biography of the River Nile. [Twigger] knows the geography of this region well and is equally au fait with its turbulent history...many entertaining snippets of information -- Theo Walden ― THE LADY if you have read Twigger before, you will know to expect divergence, wit, a weakness with the esoteric, an ability to make even the most obscure details seem relevant. All of which is perfectly suited to this subject and makes for an entertaining and absorbing read ― THE OBSERVER Hugely impressive in its research, Red Nile is a torrent of fanatical rulers, assassinations, wild explorers and dastardly goings-on -- Philip Marsden ― MAIL ON SUNDAY The Nile has attracted adventurers since ancient times, and Twigger heads for the source of the river... The history of the river and the countries it passes through is interwoven with many interesting snippets - for example that Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat said that the "a