PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement\"This skilfully constructed book explores a number of apparently quite separate worlds ... [Baker\'s] ties of nationality (she is American by birth, Indian by marriage) give the work a distinctive cultural perspective. It proceeds as a series of cameos of characters and glimpses of incidents and worlds, almost always with a secure evidential base: there is pleasingly little speculation masquerading as special author insight and instead an impressive list of endnotes. What propels the book forward is less an internal narrative than the sweep of world events in a tumultuous period of history. The characters publish works and climb mountains, paint and conduct surveys, but the book itself has no clear narrative drive. This shows itself particularly at the end: The Last Englishmen peters out rather than concluding, while a postscript indicates that the end isn’t really the end anyway ... Baker skilfully holds our interest almost to the end, despite juggling so many actors and despite their unattractive self-interest and sense of entitlement ... Maintaining readers’ interest in such a bunch is a real achievement.
