Kitchener's reputation was savaged in the biography by Sir Philip Magnus, and this seems at least partly an effort to restore his old standing. Though his early Irish background is sometimes stressed by commentators, Pollock shows that it meant little to him in later life. He also discounts rumours of his homosexuality - Kitchener is known to have proposed marriage to at least one woman, and there is no proof of any relationships with men. Much of the book is taken up with his campaign in the Sudan in 1898, when he revenged Gordon's death at Khartoum and won the crushing victory of Omdurman. There it more or less stops, without moving on to his autocratic mismanagement of the first World War and his death at sea in 1916 from a German torpedo, increasingly discredited and isolated.