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The Last Englishmen: Love, War, and the End of Empire

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Description

A sumptuous biographical saga, both intimate and epic, in regards to the waning of the British Empire in India

John Auden used to be a pioneering geologist of the Himalaya. Michael Spender used to be the first to attract a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. Even as their younger brothers―W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender―achieved literary fame, they vied to be included on an expedition that would deliver Everest’s summit to an Englishman, a quest that had transform a metaphor for Britain’s struggle to deal with power over India. To this rivalry used to be added any other: in the summertime of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would resolve where each and every man’s wartime loyalties would lie.

Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep.

Dense with romance and intrigue, and of startling relevance for the great power games of our own day, Deborah Baker’s The Last Englishmen is an engrossing story that traces the end of empire and the stirring of a new world order.

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