The Jewel in the Crown is an impressive and important work. Scott manages to bring India to life in a physical as well as a spiritual sense. He paints scenes that swelter, you can smell the stench of the waste in the river, you can picture the long verandah of The MacGregor House and the lush and overgrown remains of the Bibighar Gardens, smell the fetid breath of the beggars and the acrid smoke of the cheap cigarettes. He is just as facile in painting emotional territory. It was easy to feel the confusion, distress, unhappiness, humiliation, condescension, and momentary joys of his characters. Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of, standing where a lane ended and cultivation began... For me, the British Raj is an extended metaphor [and] I don’t think a writer chooses his metaphors. They choose him.” Paul Scott was conscripted into the British Army as a private early in 1940, and all his novels draw on his experiences of India and service in the armed forces. They feature social privilege and class, oppression and racial strata within the British Empire. He always felt himself to be an outsider in his own country: The “jewel” in the title is India herself, in the crown of the British Empire. The metaphor conveys paternalism, with Indian people a subject race, who are ruled by the British Raj. The Queen is Victoria, but metaphorically she is the Raj too. There is love in this paternalistic relationship, but in the end it is thwarted.

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It is perhaps a matter of personality and reading taste, which sections a specific reader will find most interesting. The last days of the British Raj in India as the Second World War leads inevitably towards independence. Unlike Wide Saargasso Sea, Paul scott casts a wider net to encompass not only social aspect of British reign in India but also explores class warfare within British Indians and the slowly brewing times of revolution.Set in a country on the brink of war and weary of colonial rule, gang rape of a young British woman associated with a young Indian man shakes the apparent stillness that seemed to have covered the vast lands. It stops being a case about a British and an Indian; the investigation takes a different turn when the British woman, Daphne, mentions possibility of a Muslim to be present during the heinous act. The case takes a completely different turn when he And in its amazing approach to style. Look at the second sentence of my quote above; it is deliberately involuted writing, whose phrases curl in and around each other in a manner both dense and rich. I quoted that first sentence because it is such a clear summary of the book: the rape, the context of events, and the setting: the fictional town of Mayapore in British-ruled India in 1942. But as I read on, I find that it is the second, more difficult, sentence that is the more significant. For that is what Scott achieves, to paint a complex, many-faceted portrait of "the continuum of human affairs," out of which the story emerges almost by accident, in passing glimpses in a rear-view mirror. It is as a transitional history book, on a path to interesting light readers in conventional history, that this book excels, drawing the reader in with its many photos of the actors in the series paired with real-life images of the Windsor family and grounding the Windsors in the context of world history. I could easily see asking students of Modern British History in a prep school setting to watch the series, read this book, and then read about the corresponding period in Sarah Bradford's popular and accessible Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times as part of a class project.This is my favorite book of the year, after Notorious RBG and It's What I Do. Apparently this is a year marked by nonfiction works for me. Robert's other books include biographies of the gangster Meyer Lansky, Princess Grace of Monaco and a study of Sotheby's auction house. He co- authored The Year 1000 - An Englishman's World, a description of life at the turn of the last millennium. In 2002, the Golden Jubilee Year of Queen Elizabeth II, he published Royal (Monarch in America), hailed by Andrew Roberts in London's Sunday Telegraph as "compulsively readable", and by Martin Amis in The New Yorker as "definitive".

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Truly excellent historical novels capture the history of a time and place through human interactions. History is made by human beings going about their business, with all their failings, prejudices and strivings. This novel is one of the better ones I've ever read in helping to understand India under British rule, The Raj. It not only tells us what, but how, and even more importantly, why. This is the first book of a quartet, and I have no doubt that when I finish the fourth one, I can claim it is the "War and Peace" of India. George VI, the father of the current queen, summed up his daughters’ personalities when he once said, “Elizabeth is my pride, and Margaret is my joy.”Sister Ludmila, the sister that was not a sister, but who exhibited all the characteristics of what we wish the church could be, is a witness to part of the events surrounding the tragedy. Scott has this great scene when and old and blind Ludmila is talking with GOD.

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I would have liked to have felt some empathy for at least a few of the characters. Although accurately rendered, the words of the British military figures really exasperated me. British mannerisms have a tendency to annoy me. So even if the story accurately portrays the characters I did not enjoy it.

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Fascinating and fast-paced, this is a unique look behind the history that inspired the show and the years that would prove to be the making of the Queen. In both cases, they are stories of the Siva cycle of destruction and rejuvenation (or creation), so entwined they not only can't be separated, but sometimes can't be told apart.

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a b Milliot, Jim. "Centrello Details Crown Reorg". PublishersWeekly.com . Retrieved August 2, 2022. a b Cyr, Diane (January 1988). "Ten inducted into Publishing Hall of Fame". Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management. Archived from the original on June 23, 2006. Nat Wartels, founder, Crown Publishers, inducted for outstanding contributions to book publishing. Wartels' philosophy has been "to perceive what people in the marketplace want, and find the right author, art director and whoever else is needed to shape the book for the audience." With that, Wartels organized the bankrupt Outlet Book Company—which he bought for a few hundred dollars during the Depression—into highly successful Crown Publishing.I hadn't realised when I borrowed this audiobook that it was only actually covering material up to 1955 - I was wondering why the narrative was moving so slowly and ended so suddenly! Considering this I found it okay and bumped my score up by a half star, but still rounded down to 3 as I didn't think it's the best when it comes to these sorts of books. I really enjoy auto/biographies and am interested in the Royal Family in general, so was actually surprised that this didn't work as well for me as I thought it might. There was a lot of comparison with the series, which I didn't like as I thought there was a lot of alluding to the fact that the series has a lot of interpretation by the writers and producers, implying that this is true fact when it is in fact also an interpretation by a single writer. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, I just felt like comparisons were drawn for the sake of drawing them, and I would have much preferred to just hear about the biography itself.