“... and her friends, surrounded by ‘talk of books, and socialism, and plays, and whether Sir Rabindranath Tagore should have won the Nobel Prize’: ‘She was home at last.’ That Brittain was demanding, greedy for reassurance only made the attraction stronger. By dint of relentless warmth and encouragement, Winifred talked Vera back from the edge ...”

“... and writing a string of books about the subcontinent. The first was a ‘life and work’ of Rabindranath Tagore, one of several eminent family friends, who also included Nehru.* There is a wonderful photo of Gandhi in the Thompsons’ garden at Boars Hill in 1931: a photographer in a Calcutta studio might have unfurled a backdrop labelled ...”

“... China. But then he also seems to think it unimaginable that Xi, or anyone else, might have read Rabindranath Tagore or Mikhail Sholokhov (Hemingway is allowed as a possibility). What is clear is that on his tenth application, Xi was accepted as a party member. In 1975, he left the countryside to take a degree in chemical engineering at Tsinghua ...”

“... opium.’ Ghosh notes the familiar names in the long list of participants in the trade. The poet Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather Dwarkanath was among the Indian merchants who, after the First Opium War, petitioned the colonial government for a share of the reparations China was forced to pay. Warren Delano Jr, grandfather of FDR, was one of many ...”