the last englishmen: love, war, and the end of empire (deborah baker)

Baker’s tome seeks to encompass a multitude of historical nodal points, which over and underlap. The fall of the Raj, Gandhi and Nehru, the poets Spender and Auden, their brothers, their brothers’ lovers, the conquest of Everest, the impact of the second world war on geo-political history. Perhaps inevitably there are moments when it feels as though a certain shorthand is being employed by the writer. The book is lengthy, but could easily have been ten times as long if it were to fully investigate every strand it takes on. Nevertheless, there is much to be gleaned here. The way in which Auden and Spender’s brothers were part of teams that set out, unsuccessfully to conquer Everest as part of a colonial project, and how both came to realise the vanity, even stupidity of this, in spite of their personal ambitions. Also the way that the scientific work they did in the Himalayas and Karakorams would contribute indirectly to the war effort. In the process, Baker analyses the turbulent decline of the British empire in India, held together by an outdated ideology of British exceptionalism. As such, the book dovetails neatly with Baker’s husband, Amitav Ghosh’s account of the origins of the British empire in India, Smoke and Ashes.