A life lived in full - there's more to Stanford Raffles than just Singapore

I had seen his statue on the touristic Clarke Quay and had an obligatory Singapore Sling in the Raffles Hotel - couldn't possibly afford to stay there, of course - but other than that, my knowledge of the man who founded the Lion City (not alone, as it turns out) was decidedly sketchy.

Victoria Glendinning's Raffles and the Golden Opportunity covers the life of this East India Company man, the son of a lowly ship's captain, born Thomas Stamford Raffles on a boat in the seas off Jamaica in 1781, who through his own vision, and the help of a couple of well-placed mentors, would end up with a knighthood and as the lieutenant-governor of Java - after organising its invasion.

Securing an agreement to have a foothold in Singapore only came later on his life, in 1819. That was the most significant moment in his career - yet his bosses didn't know until later that he had done it.

Raffles is not a quick read, but it's an interesting one: it doesn't just tell the story of one man's "diplomatic" career, but provides the reader with a sumptuous array of side characters and, most vitally, the historical background. In the early 19th century, Britain and France were locked in the Napoleonic wars, then Spain joined in. That was the European theatre of battle but it had a direct, if delayed, impact on some of the European countries doing business in Southeast Asia - Britain, the Dutch (sometimes in co-operation with the French) plus those dastardly opportunistic upstarts, the Americans.

Raffles is a complicated subject to take on. He started as a clerk at the East India Company's headquarters, India House in London, where he befriended the son of the company secretary, a move that secured him a position in Penang, Malaya, and improved his salary from £70 a week to £1,500. That was the start of his civil service or diplomatic career, but he had myriad interests.

Like a number of his peers, Raffles was a botanist and collected flora and fauna wherever he went. During his career - shortlived, with an early death at 45 - he would spend time at Penang, Malacca and on Java, and wrote of how he had a particularly good sketch artist from Macau to provide natural history drawings.