An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.

institutions build their grandest monuments just before they crumble into irrelevance.

Martin Wiener proposed an ‘export’ model: the murder rate had dropped in Britain, he suggested, because ‘the most aggressive citizens were busily wreaking havoc overseas’.

Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the poetic voice of British imperialism, hailed him as ‘The Man Who Saved India’.

‘Hate begets hate. Violence begets violence,’