Despite the received wisdom that almost any observation about India is as true as it is false, the pile of books attempting to ‘explain’ the country grows ever higher. But if generalisations about India are too big and specifics too small, what is left for a writer to write? In Makers of Modern India, historian […]
Despite twelve volumes of Collected Works, thirty-odd biographies and innumerable studies and festschrifts, Subhas Chandra Bose remains an enigma. To contemporaries engaged in the struggle for Indian independence in the 1930s he was an inspiration – fearless, intellectually robust and highly articulate. Twice elected president of the Congress Party, Bose represented a radical Bengali alternative […]
In March 2010, almost twelve months after the hostilities in northern Sri Lanka that had caught the world’s attention had finished, I drove up the road from the town of Vavuniya to Kilinochchi, the former headquarters of the Tamil Tigers. Velupillai Prabhakaran, the violent and dictatorial leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), […]
Back in 1966, The Times gushed over Pakistan’s success, describing it as ‘one of the most remarkable examples of state and nation building in the post-war period’. In the decades since, the newspaper’s discursive arsenal has been equipped with somewhat different ideas: in March 2009, it described a Pakistan that was ‘losing the war on […]
Described as ‘a history of the Indian subcontinent and its various rulers through a history of its food’, Curry: A Biography might more accurately be called Curry: A Travelogue. Sweeping through 2,000 years of history and swirling round the globe from Kerala and Kashmir to Java, Tonga, Birmingham and back again, it is the story […]
The history of humanity is largely the history of empires, and empires have always striven to keep the conquerors separate from the conquered. For all the stern reality of such distinctions, however, they have never been absolute – the story of empire, as Maya Jasanoff argues in this captivating book, is not just of the […]
An occupational hazard of publishing on British India is that you get bombarded with genealogical enquiries. The correspondents, though polite, can be quite persistent and not easily persuaded that all reference to Ensign Dobbs of the 43rd has somehow eluded your researches. In the 1970s, when the India Office Library and Records were still housed […]
From their first recorded meeting in 1901, the lives of two of the most celebrated statesmen of the twentieth century, Lloyd George and Churchill, were inextricably intertwined. For almost fifty years, surviving disputes and arguments, their shared passion for politics bound them together. It was a friendship that endured until Lloyd George’s death in 1945.
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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