Basic truth about the colonies, Heaslop. Any time there’s trouble, you can put it down to books. Too many of the wrong ideas getting into the heads o… - Shashi Tharoor

If ever the Empire comes to ruin, Heaslop, mark my words, the British publisher will be to blame.

The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present.

Democracy, Ganapathi, is perhaps the most arrogant of all forms of government, because only democrats presume to represent an entire people: monarchs and oligarchs have no such pretensions. But democracies that turn authoritarian go a step beyond arrogance; they claim to represent a people subjugating themselves. India was now the laboratory of this strange political experiment. Our people would be the first in the world to vote on their own subjugation.

We brought up our sons to ‘eat everything’, but their mixed genetic inheritance prevailed: one twin took to meat-eating with relish, while the other, at age seven, with no persuasion whatsoever from his father, turned staunchly vegetarian.