Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom by Ramachandra Guha
Group biography is most satisfying when it combines atmosphere with an overarching mission. This is especially so with colonial history.
In 2018, Deborah Baker recounted the efforts of John Auden and Michael Spender—the older, more obscure brothers of Wystan and Stephen—to scale Mount Everest in The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire. (Baker’s excellent book includes veteran climber Bill Wager’s timeless advice for any collective enterprise: Always recruit someone “so universally disliked that the others, with a common object for their spleen, would be drawn together in close companionship.” He referred, naturally, to the “impossibly pompous” Spender.)
