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“... families, stemming the flow. Most of the migrant workers had originally meant to stay a few years; go back with some money. But it didn’t often work out that way. Most of them stayed. Jonathon Green’s book is not easy reading, nor can it have been intended to be. He has interviewed 103 first-generation immigrants to Britain about their experiences. His ...”

“... the letters they sent home to mothers, fathers and brothers, mostly in the Punjab, are anything to go by. Similar letters home, sent by British soldiers to Surrey or Wolverhampton or Newcastle, were, it is true, mostly composed in the same vein: it was considered almost a military duty to sound cheery, and to conceal the real horrors of war from the folks back ...”

“... past is a foreign country,’ goes the famous opening sentence of L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, ‘they do things differently there.’ But the photograph tells me to invert this idea: it reminds me that it’s my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time. A few years ago I ...”

“... end of the novel Bhaskar has embarked on a delayed honeymoon with his new wife. The young couple go by train and bus to Darjeeling. Mini has returned to the flat that she shares with her older sister. The two women worry about how they will manage in their old age. Khuku plans to visit them the following day. Chaudhuri empties his novel of events to free ...”

“... conduct. There is no good reason why such penalties, in the form of exemplary damages, should go into the pocket of a victim who has already been awarded proper compensatory damages, but every reason why a media outlet which casually violates people’s privacy or reputation in pursuit of circulation should find that such conduct does not pay. Yet ...”

“... in fact meant ‘by what means and in what circumstances’, and so it was appropriate to go into the details of what had happened and in particular to look at any official dereliction of duty that might be thought to have been causative. No doubt their lordships were much influenced by the statistics on prison deaths: in the years between 1990 and ...”

“... would turn down the crown.’ It was a shrewd move on her part, as was the choice of Manmohan Singh as prime minister, the first member of an ethnic minority to become the head of government. The choice pleased secularists at home and capitalists everywhere were thrilled that such a seasoned ‘reformer’ (i.e. supporter of deregulation and ...”

“... into the canteen to clean the floors, then loses this job as well and becomes a handyman for Mr Singh, his Bentley-driving landlord. The London he lives in, with its boarding houses and cowed inhabitants, might be the Dublin of Dubliners – it’s a territory McGahern returns to in his short stories; his Dublin nobodies are sometimes also moral ...”

“... been put at risk, not just in southern Africa but everywhere else too: above all in India. As Umr Singh, the Sikh mouthpiece of ‘A Sahib’s War’, dutifully puts it, in speaking of what he has witnessed during the war in South Africa: ‘It is for Hind [India] that the Sahibs are fighting this war. Ye cannot in one place rule and in another bear ...”

“... of financiers in London when news of the plague first emerged, the Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, architect of the New Economic Policy (India’s fast-forward version of Thatcherism) and the hero of millions of middle-class Indians, blamed the epidemic on loss-making public-sector units tying up valuable capital. Dr Lalith Nath, dean of the All-India ...”

“... naked and surrounded by a cordon of fellow protesters, on the service road in Delhi where Jyoti Singh Pandey – Nirbhaya, as she was called in the press – was thrown from a bus in 2012 by the men who had raped her. Both actions were recorded in Ban en Banlieue (2015), a book on ‘auto-sacrifice’ assembled by chance selection from dozens of ...”

“... to be the sources of the Nile, Samuel Baker left London with the effete-looking Maharajah Duleep Singh to shoot wild boar in Serbia and bears in Transylvania. The pair got stuck in Widdin, the main Turkish fortress in the Balkans. To pass the time, they attended a slave auction, and it was there that Baker, a widower with four daughters – who was never in ...”

“... a friend of Hana’s father from before the war in Toronto; and later, a young sapper, Kirpal Singh, nicknamed Kip – a Sikh from the Punjab, who has been detailed to clear the area around the villa of mines. Caravaggio and Kip materialise like figures in a dream. Both are masters of stealth and delicacy: Caravaggio as a professional robber, and Kip as a ...”

“... the longest-serving democratically elected Communist Party leader in the world. Even as Manmohan Singh prepared to pry open India’s sclerotic state-run economy, Basu and Calcutta would hold out. Industrialists abandoned the city and foreign investors looked to Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore. Well-heeled young Bengalis had long journeyed to London and Oxbridge ...”

“... he still quarrelled and his in-laws were alive, his wife, crying softly, would pack her things and go away for a week to her parents’ house; and he would be left dumbstruck, unable to say anything. The second was his grandson – Vikram: Bonny. He could not reconcile himself to the fact that the boy had to tag along part of the year with Jayojit, and then ...”