Book · 1998 · Adventure and adventurers
King Solomon's Mines
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Why people recommend it
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard is a classic Victorian adventure novel that popularized the lost-world genre and shaped Western perceptions of the African continent during the height of the British Empire. Robert Evans discussed the book across multiple episodes of Behind the Bastards while investigating historical figures and colonial exploits. Evans reflected on his own childhood reading habits, noting that he was raised on adventure stories from the age of exploration that heavily featured works like King Solomon's Mines. He used the novel to contextualize the cultural background of individuals like Simon Mann, suggesting that being a British child of that era made it almost certain that he would have read such literature. Furthermore, Evans identified Haggard's novel as a crucial cultural artifact that served as a psychological seed and blueprint for subsequent generations of white men. He argued that the romanticized, imperialist tropes found within the pages of King Solomon's Mines directly inspired a persistent, misguided desire among adventurous outsiders to carry out foreign interventions and coups in Africa. Through these critical historical analyses, the novel was framed not merely as harmless fiction, but as an influential piece of imperial propaganda that left a lasting, damaging legacy on global geopolitics and colonial ambitions.
Every mention
Robert Evans It's hard not like I was raised on a lot of imp like I read a lot like King Solomon's minds and stuff. I've… 3
“It's hard not like I was raised on a lot of imp like I read a lot like King Solomon's minds and stuff. I've talked about this in one episode. these books about like the the age of exploration and adventure”
“I'm I I'm sure he read King Solomon's Mind being a British child of that era.”
“So, uh, I want to start by going back in time to what I think is the piece of fiction that is kind of the seed for this desire in the heads of some white dudes to carry out coups in Africa because there's a single fictional book that really started this ball rolling and it's a book called King”
Also mentioned in the same episodes
Other mentions (2: passing, ad reads, own books)
“There are books which is unclear if that represents like you write an adventure novel like uh King Solomon's Mines or you write a naturalist guide or you write an ethnography”
“And I credit that to the decades I spent reading adventure novels set during the colonial era, like King Solomon's Minds.”