“... 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 ...”

“... safety of reigning monarchs by enlarging the meaning of treason. Hence the conviction of Jaswant Singh Chail, who was found on Christmas Day 2021 in the grounds of Windsor Castle with a crossbow and ammunition and was convicted of wilfully producing a loaded crossbow with intent to use it to injure the person of her majesty, contrary to the Treason Act of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... realising it was a tautology since naan means ‘bread’). For a treat our family would go to Uddin’s Manzil Tandoori Restaurant on Walton Street in Oxford (long since closed down), where my sister and I would share a mushroom biryani which came with a mixed vegetable curry in a delicious oily red sauce that burned our tongues, but only ...”

“... by those who commit violence in his name. When the soft-spoken, mumbling Prime Minister Manmohan Singh kept resolutely quiet about his Congress government’s rampant corruption, Modi’s deputy, Amit Shah, mocked him for being a mauni baba – a holy man who’s taken a vow of silence. Yet Modi has been practising being a mauni in a much more invidious ...”

“... to work with a chief minister from another party in the states. Thus, for instance, while G.K. Moopanar, the Congress leader in Tamil Nadu, is a political nonentity, whose future lies behind him, Karunanidhi, the DMK leader, commands the influence, experience and power to make deals stick. Political parties in India, perhaps anywhere, as Rajni Kothari ...”

“... exhibited at an industrial exhibition in 1911 and put up in partnership by Sardar Harcharan Singh, the supervisor of the bazaar, had been a failure. The baillot, as the sugar boiler was called by the peasants, was inoperational in 1922, but there were a total of 56 ordinary oil-pressing kolhus attached to three steam engines in the bazaar. This account ...”

“... what was described as Sikh ‘terrorism’ in the Punjab. The chief of police, Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, was given powers equalling or exceeding those entrusted to Sleeman, and the number of people summarily killed certainly exceeded those who were hanged in the thug trials of the 1830s. As in the 1830s, some of those who died may have been implicated in ...”

“... amounted to might be in doubt: ‘Dry and I fear evasive,’ were his words for Subedar Jaggat Singh. ‘But I have worked out a lot of my worst points in it and perhaps it will have been useful as a purge.’ The story of Coldstream’s life moves on to invaded Italy, where he is seen hunting for suitable windows from which to paint bombed buildings, and ...”

“... de Gortari, who signed Mexico up to the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992, to Manmohan Singh, who accelerated the end of India’s ‘permit raj’ in 1991. Even Putin, no market enthusiast, introduced a raft of neoliberal reforms in the early 2000s, designed to appease the World Bank and tempt foreign investors. The Washington Consensus did not ...”

“... godlike powers.A week before The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988, Khushwant Singh, editorial adviser to Penguin India, told an interviewer that it contained ‘derogatory’ references to Islam and might incite ‘communal violence’. At the time, no one paid much attention. ‘I expected a few mullahs would be offended, call me names ...”

“... is one of the thousands that keep up the relentless pace of opium production in Ghazipur; Kesri Singh, Deeti’s brother, whose post as havildar – a sergeant – in the East India Company takes him to the Battle of Sanyuanli in the First Opium War; and Zachary Reid, a mixed-race American sailor, whose purchase of opium on the streets of Calcutta is a ...”

“... to admit to their society. A more illustrious example of a similar problem is provided by Duleep Singh, the deposed Sikh ruler of the Punjab who in 1854 at the age of 15 was brought to England and became a favourite of Queen Victoria. The attractiveness of his youthful person, the fervour of his proselytism to Christianity, and the fact that he had once been ...”

“... Reading may not make the world go round but it can make it go away, for a while. If one’s world is dirty, poor, oppressive and unfair, then that may be no small service. Books furnish the mind in a form that the bailiffs cannot repossess. If we could recover the reading practices of past generations, we would be in touch with an experience that was at once intimate and formative, on a par with, even part of, the history of love ...”

“... relations which does less than justice to a complex past. Hastings’s first biographer, the Rev. G.R. Gleig, was far from squeamish when introducing his controversial subject in an official, three-volume biography in 1841 (castigated as virtually ‘worthless’ by Bernstein, who is condescending to his numerous predecessors). Gleig’s admonitory words are ...”