Sahibs’ India: Vignettes from the Raj

the author provides wonderful descriptions of British homes and servants, their tastes and fashions, cultural idiosyncrasies, profligacy, sports, hunts and shoots, giving us, with the relaxed familiarity of the after-dinner raconteur, a flavour of the period. The book is peppered with a host of characters - astrologers, jugglers, magicians, grass-widows, the ‘fishing fleet’, missionaries, nautch girls, mavericks and eccentrics - who made India their home as the British turned from traders to empire-builders, and is interspersed with period photographs, paintings and sketches.