The idea for Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire evidently came from a couple of old black-and-white photos. One, taken in Woking on a November evening in 1941 and featured on the book’s cover, shows a group of Indian NCOs in turbans standing in the road and drinking mugs of tea, which are being dispensed […]
Peering between the curtains of his viceregal railway carriage, Lord Curzon saw so few emaciated corpses that he reckoned reports of famine in India must be greatly exaggerated. Yet, decorously outside his range of vision, perhaps as many as sixteen million Indians starved to death in the late 19th century. An empire’s most basic obligation […]
‘Imprisoned in an alien environment, poor, friendless, disoriented and alone.’ Thus Helena Drysdale portrays the plight of her forebear Isabella Gascoyne (née Campbell). She is describing the most traumatic period of Isabella’s life, not as a soldier’s grass widow on a remote Indian army cantonment, or as a settler’s wife on an isolated New Zealand […]
Since we have come to view the nineteenth century as a time of unstoppable expansion for the British Empire, it is a shock to read, at the beginning of Saul David’s entertaining and thorough account of two vital decades of that expansion, that at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign the Empire was in decline. […]
The Spanish Empire was unique – without precedent or parallel in its day. There were maritime empires that tried to control trade and there were land empires that tried to control production. Only the Spanish Empire did both on such a vast scale: from Manila to Milan and from the Missouri to the Strait of […]
The breadth and quality of A N Wilson’s literary output is phenomenal. A brilliant newspaper columnist, incapable of writing a dull paragraph, he is also the author of no fewer than nineteen novels as well as a wide range of non-fiction works, including acclaimed biographies of Jesus Christ, C S Lewis, and Tolstoy.
In the course of this scholarly book, Richard Holmes tells us that he rose from private to senior serving officer in the Territorial Army – without becoming a freemason. As his fans know, he has combined martial expertise with vigorous presentation to illuminate many a battle on the television screen. High soldierly qualities are also […]
Organising an empire doesn’t come cheap, but in the nineteenth century the manpower required to run India, compared to the prestige of ruling it, was modest. David Gilmour quotes Stalin: ‘that a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India’ was, according to the Russian leader, ‘ridiculous’. The same point was made both by critics keen to […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm