'By God, at this moment do I stand astonished at my own moderation.' So spake a great Englishman, Robert Clive, at a Parliamentary Enquiry in 1772 after his final return from Bengal - an Enquiry held as a result of accusations of graft and mismanagement in the India where he had so forcefully established the British interest. The accusations were of the wildest kind. Writing some seventy years later, Macaulay, in spite of the stricture that 'Clive, like most men who are born with strong passions and tried by great temptations, committed great faults,' added that Britain had 'scarcely ever produced a man more truly great either in arms or in council.' Son of a Shropshire squire of small estate, for domestic reasons Clive was sent at an early age to live with his uncle