India
Real life
When in India, I always appal my highly educated tour guides. They despair of me, as they drag me round…
Trouble brewing
Indian magnate Nirmal Sethia on what the English get wrong about tea – and the other countries seeking to recruit our discontented non-doms
Portrait of the week
Home Tom Hayes, aged 35, a former City trader who rigged the Libor rates daily for nearly four years while…
Lost horizon
Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. I…
Degrees in disaster
From Greece to Kenya, the worst economic ideas come from alumni of British universities
The forgotten faithful
It is often said that cricket was ‘a game invented by the English and played by Indians’, and every so…
The traffic in human misery
When Sara discovers that her husband died in India, rather than being killed in Afghanistan as she was told, she…
Katmandu Notebook
After the first earthquake we were told that the chance of another one was 200 to 1. A fortnight later,…
Object lesson
The idea of using objects — salt, cod, nutmeg, silk — to turn history lessons into something popular and accessible…
Servants of the super-rich
There is a huge industry catering to London’s foreign plutocracy
The lives of others
‘I call Zelma Cacik who may be living in London,’ says the announcer, in the clipped RP accent of the…
Two wheels good
Bicycles — in Britain, anyway — are the Marmite means of transport. I am among the bicycle-lovers, almost religious and…
The roots of the matter
British people buy £43 million worth of human hair a year. So who’s selling?
Long life
There are already people camping outside St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, to await the birth shortly of another royal baby, the…
A mingling of blood and ink
Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an…
Crossing cultures
For an Indian woman to make a dancework about La Bayadère is a promising prospect. This classical ballet of 1877…
Diary
This last week, in India, I visited six cities in seven days: Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta and New Delhi.…
Passage to India
After a month cooped up in a Scottish castle, no internet, no TV, and no radio, watching hectic snowflakes billowing…
From socialite to socialist
Princess Sophia Alexandrovna Duleep Singh (1876–1948) had a heritage as confusing as her name. Her father was a deposed Indian…
Poor show
Bombay is now called Mumbai by everyone bar its residents, whose historic name (from the Portuguese for ‘beautiful cove’) has…
India’s sacrifice
At six o’clock on 31 May 1916, an Indian soldier who had been captured on the Western Front alongside British…
Cricket must return to Pakistan
In a tiny courtyard just off the teeming alleys of Lahore’s old town, a young Pakistani boy in a gleaming…
Colonial cringe
Gymkhana is a fashionable Indian restaurant in Albemarle Street. It was, according to its natty website, ‘inspired by Colonial Indian…
Wild life
England We dropped off our daughter Eve at her new school in the Midlands and started the long journey…
Fabled splendours
Peter Parker on the age-old allure of the Indian subcontinent
