Using Gordon's journal and his letters to his sister Augusta the author, whilst recounting Gordon's life, helps us to understand his single-mindedness, his contrariness and disdain of material rewards which he had to reconcile with an overriding ambition to influence and succeed.

This is a biography of one of the most colorful soldiers who ever lived - "Chinese Gordon," known later as "Gordon of Khartoum," who died a martyr's death during the siege of Khartoum in the Sudan in 1885. To Victorian England he was the very model of a soldier-saint and Christian martyr; to the idol-smashing historians of the 1920's he was a drunken charlatan; but to Anthony Nutting both these images were caricatures needing reinterpretation, for in his view Gordon was a very complicated and unusually interesting man.

From his days as a bright cadet in the late 1840's, he was always an eccentric and irregular soldier who, as time went on, grew more strongly religious. Brave to the point of being foolhardy (in his whole life the only thing he carried into battle was a rattan cane), he served in the Crimea and later burst into fame as Chinese Gordan when, at the head of a group of mercenaries known as the Ever Victorious Army, he suppressed the Taiping Rebellion against the Emperor of China in the 1860s.

After his efforts to quell the slave trade in the Sudan, he was asked to help put down the revolt of the Sudanese, led by the Mahdi, against their Egyptian masters, and it was his decision to go to Khartoum and stay there that cost him his life.