MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

PARTITION by Barney White-Spunner

(S&S £10, 432 pp) LAST year saw the 70th anniversary of Indian independence and the creation of the state of Pakistan.

Partition, and the transfer of power after nearly a century of the British Raj, was accomplished under the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, in just 71 days, amid chaotic mass migration and scenes of appalling violence in which friends and neighbours turned on each other.

Barney White-Spunner served as the commander of British and Coalition troops in south-eastern Iraq in 2008, and he sees parallels between the British experience in India and in the Middle East: ‘We had stayed on too long and with insufficient strength to do anything.’

Written ‘from a soldier’s perspective’ and drawing on eyewitness testimony, his study of partition is a vivid, often harrowing account of the seismic events of 70 years ago.

GAINSBOROUGH by James Hamilton

(W&N £10.99, 448 pp) ‘THOMAS Gainsborough lived as if electricity shot through his sinews and crackled at his finger ends,’ writes biographer James Hamilton.

‘ There is a fire in Gainsborough: it lights up his paintings, but beyond its flicker it also reveals a lifelong sense of unease.’

He was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, in 1727, the son of a shroud-maker. His talent for drawing was noticed early on, and at 13 he was sent to London to be an apprentice to an engraver.

He threw himself into the busy cultural life of 18thcentury London and Bath, where he became a successful society artist, commissioned to paint the portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte.

This affectionate and intricately researched biography is a memorable account of Gainsborough as ‘one of the most joyous eccentrics’ of his time.

EVERY THIRD THOUGHT by Robert McCrum

(Picador £9.99, 256 pp) ON A SUMMER’S day in London in 2015, author and journalist Robert McCrum tripped and fell in the street. Though stunned and bleeding, he wasn’t badly hurt.

Nevertheless, ‘on this day I had passed a fateful frontier of experience, and was no longer as blithe or as nonchalant as once I’d been.’ He’d suffered an incapacitating stroke 20 years earlier and had recovered, although he now walked with a cane.

The fall, coming soon after his 60th birthday, ‘had dumped me, metaphorically, outside an almost intangible and imminently dreadful threshold’, and his thoughts turned towards ageing and death.

In his wise and eloquent book, McCrum finds consolation in reading, friends — and, in a joyful final twist, in late-blooming love.