John Keay
Shine & Squalor
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum
By Katherine Boo
Portobello Books 254pp £14.99
India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation
By Oliver Balch
Faber & Faber 327pp £14.99
Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast
By Samanth Subramanian
Atlantic Books 209pp £12.99
These three books just about sum up modern India: nauseating in its indifference to social deprivation, tiresome in its obsession with globalised modernity, and utterly charming when least expected. The works of three journalists, one American, one English and one Indian, all of these books have merit; none disappoints and one positively delights.
Katherine Boo, a socially conscientious staffer at the New Yorker who is married to the Indian political historian Sunil Khilnani, elected to explore how the urban poor of her husband’s homeland are being affected by their experience of ‘juxtaposed inequality’ and the ‘infrastructure of opportunity’. She approached the subject cautiously,
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
Twitter Feed
It wasn’t until 1825 that Pepys’s diary became available for the first time. How it was eventually decrypted and published is a story of subterfuge and duplicity.
Kate Loveman tells the tale.
Kate Loveman - Publishing Pepys
Kate Loveman: Publishing Pepys
literaryreview.co.uk
Arthur Christopher Benson was a pillar of the Edwardian establishment. He was supremely well connected. As his newly published diaries reveal, he was also riotously indiscreet.
Piers Brendon compares Benson’s journals to others from the 20th century.
Piers Brendon - Land of Dopes & Tories
Piers Brendon: Land of Dopes & Tories - The Benson Diaries: Selections from the Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson by Eamon Duffy & Ronald Hyam (edd)
literaryreview.co.uk
Of the siblings Gwen and Augustus John, it is Augustus who has commanded most attention from collectors and connoisseurs.
Was he really the finer artist, asks Tanya Harrod, or is it time Gwen emerged from her brother’s shadow?
Tanya Harrod - Cut from the Same Canvas
Tanya Harrod: Cut from the Same Canvas - Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
literaryreview.co.uk