All the Raj: beyond the memsahibs

If you read one book this week

The Silent Boy by Andrew Taylor (Harper) R180

Now out in paperback, Taylor's richly-detailed French Revolution chiller topped many critics' best of 2014 lists. It is 1792 and London clerk Edward Savill travels to Paris, a city gripped by the terror of the guillotine, after the death of his estranged wife. She leaves behind a 10-year-old boy who has been struck mute by some horrifying incident he has witnessed. Savill brings the boy back to England and a community of French exiles - and that is when the real dangers start. Dickens and Hilary Mantel fans won't be disappointed.

The issue

Britain's colonial adventure in India is back in vogue. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown, the first volume of The Raj Quartet, a series acclaimed as "one of the most important landmarks of post-war fiction".

In fact, before The Jewel in the Crown's publication in 1966 Britain seemed rather reluctant to dwell too deeply on its imperial past. As Ferdinand Mount, a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, wrote in the London Sunday Times at the weekend: "The truth is that for my parents' generation, and for mine too I think, the subject of the British empire in India was unmentionable. The memory of it was a huge embarrassment, a chapter in our island story that we wanted to skip. We brushed it away with jokes about pigsticking and memsahibs."

Later this month, Mount's own eagerly anticipated The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905 (Simon & Schuster) is published. It's a history seen through the eyes of a single family of Scottish settlers - his own. For a century, the Lows of Clatto ranged across the subcontinent, from the heat of Madras to the snows of Afghanistan. They lived through the most appalling atrocities and retaliated with some of their own.A recurring theme of this work is Mount's painful discovery of his family's actions - through their correspondence and diaries - and of those parts of British history which many have preferred to forget.

Still with the Raj, I suppose it's too much to ask of the gnomes in Randburg that they acquire the rights to Indian Summers, the acclaimed Channel 4 drama series with Julie Walters and Henry Lloyd-Hughes, and give us DStv mugs some proper television? I know it's not choked with jutting nipples and violent gunplay, but this sort of thing need not be American to be worth our while.

The bottom line

"Spain today is a democracy. Who was a communist, who a fascist, who connived with whom in the Spanish labyrinth are questions for academics to mull." - Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster)