03129cam a2200373 i 4500
353170315
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20180824120000.0
180727s2018||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u
9781555978044
28.00
1555978045
28.00
eng
rda
TxAuBib
rda
Baker, Deborah,
1959-
The last Englishmen
[BOOK] :
love, war, and the end of empire /
Deborah Baker.
Minneapolis, Minnesota :
Graywolf Press,
2018.
xxiv, 356 pages ;
24 cm.
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Includes bibliographical references (pages 341-350) and index.
apart I. To live as on a mountain: The lakes ; The steamship and the spinning wheel ; Bengali Baboo ; The thrust fault ; Triangles ; The school of art -- part II. The impersonal eye: Perfect monsters ; Goddess Mother of the world ; I spy ; The Moscow agent ; In the ice mountains ; Taking a hat off a mouse ; The truth about love -- part III. The fall of the gods: Somewhere a strange and shrewd tomorrow ; The magnified earth ; A representative Indian ; An infinite ocean of sorrow ; A boy falling out of the sky ; Incompatible gods, irreconcilable differences ; Night falls.
"John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalaya. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While 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 become a metaphor for Britain's struggle to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: in the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine where each 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".
20180824.
Sharp, Nancy
1909-2001.
Auden, J.B.
(John Bicknell)
1903-1991.
Spender, Michael
1907-1945.
British
Social life and customs.
British
India
History.
Surveyors
Great Britain
Biography.
Explorers
Great Britain
Biography.
Geologists
Great Britain
Biography.
Biographies.
India
History
British occupation, 1765-1947.