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
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind
'Don’t think of Watergate as being about a break-in, but about what the break-in exposed: dirty ops, dirty tricks, dirty money.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-the-presidents-mendacity