David Gilmour
Divided It Stands
Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire
By Alex von Tunzelmann
Simon & Schuster 464pp £20 order from our bookshop
The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
By Yasmin Khan
Yale University Press 251pp £19.99 order from our bookshop
Indian Summer is surely destined for Hollywood. Equipped with a handsome and flamboyant cast, Alex von Tunzelmann has already more or less arranged the settings, designed the costumes and produced a script which flits from place to place and from character to character, deftly interweaving private lives with political events in a racy, dramatic and often humorous narrative.
It’s easy to envisage some colourful scenes: ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten and ‘David’ Prince of Wales larking about in a pool and pig-sticking in Jodhpur (frivolous upper-class background); Mountbatten as viceroy and his wife Edwina having nightly rows in midsummer Delhi (marital stress and pathos); Gandhi on his day of silence visiting
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis
*Offer ends in TWO days*
Take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'Nourished on a diet of exceptionalism and meritocracy, millennials internalised the harmful falsehood that hard work necessarily yields success. The very least they should settle for is a "cool job", one that ... is the focus of their "passion".'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/workers-twerkers