India
Bicycling: the Marmite means of transport
Bicycles — in Britain, anyway — are the Marmite means of transport. I am among the bicycle-lovers, almost religious and…
Whose hair are you buying?
British people buy £43 million worth of human hair a year. So who’s selling?
The birth of a royal baby is hardly an exciting event
There are already people camping outside St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, to await the birth shortly of another royal baby, the…
Murder on Grub Street
Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an…
An Indian Bayadère that meets a sludgy end
For an Indian woman to make a dancework about La Bayadère is a promising prospect. This classical ballet of 1877…
Jeffrey Archer’s diary: a pirate at the traffic lights, and other Indian wonders
This last week, in India, I visited six cities in seven days: Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta and New Delhi.…
What it’s really like to live in India today - stressful
After a month cooped up in a Scottish castle, no internet, no TV, and no radio, watching hectic snowflakes billowing…
Sophia Duleep Singh: 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…
The National’s latest attempt to cheer us up: three hours of poverty porn
Bombay is now called Mumbai by everyone bar its residents, whose historic name (from the Portuguese for ‘beautiful cove’) has…
The voices of Indian PoWs captured in the first world war
At six o’clock on 31 May 1916, an Indian soldier who had been captured on the Western Front alongside British…
International cricket must return to Pakistan (and my team went first)
In a tiny courtyard just off the teeming alleys of Lahore’s old town, a young Pakistani boy in a gleaming…
Gymkhana is morally disgusting – and fortunately the food’s disgusting too
Gymkhana is a fashionable Indian restaurant in Albemarle Street. It was, according to its natty website, ‘inspired by Colonial Indian…
From Burma — or maybe Saigon — to Manchester via Calcutta
England We dropped off our daughter Eve at her new school in the Midlands and started the long journey…
From Scylax to the Beatles: the West's lust for India
Peter Parker on the age-old allure of the Indian subcontinent
A Mughal Disneyland and a ripping yarn
Mysore, once the capital of a princely kingdom in South India, has lost its lustre. In Mahesh Rao’s darkly comic…
Start with a torpedo, and see where you go from there
Sebastian Barry’s new novel opens with a bang, as a German torpedo hits a supply ship bound for the Gold…
Lawlessness, corruption, poverty and pollution: the city where we're all headed
India’s vast polluted capital, where brutality, corruption and ruthless self-seeking are endemic, could be the blueprint of the future, says Peter Parker
Hope for one of the most turbulent, traumatised regions in the world
John Keay’s excellent new book on the modern history of South Asia plunges the reader head first into some wildly…
The war on Christians
It’s time the world paid more attention to assaults against Christians
