Piers Brendon

The Fakir and the Bulldog

Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

By

Hutchinson 736pp £25 order from our bookshop

Double biographies are now all the rage and Arthur Herman has had the good idea of juxtaposing the lives of those great imperial adversaries, Mohandas Gandhi and Winston Churchill. They only met once, in 1906, when Churchill was Under-Secretary for the Colonies and Gandhi called on him to protest (in vain) about racial discrimination against his own community in South Africa. But their careers were closely entwined and the two men came to personify opposing sides in the struggle for Indian independence.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    • Hi , we would love to review 'Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar' in our next issue! Please could you get in… ,
    Follow Us