No other seemingly benign exercise has such far-reaching consequences as drawing a line on a map. On the face of it, you merely put pencil to paper, but the line actually runs through towns, villages, valleys, farmlands, forests, rivers, ponds—and people. Sometimes those assigned to run the pencil do so, without realising the impact their line is going to have on humankind. Sir Cyril Radcliffe was one of them. Sir Cyril had built a formidable reputation in Britain as a barrister before he went down in history as probably the world’s most infamous cartographer. In July 1947, he was summoned to
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