Friends in Youth

Dinshaw’s Friends in Youth is an exceptionally accomplished work: unfailingly eloquent, impressively researched, original in form and shrewdly alert to the mendacities in his subjects’ own accounts of events. It provides a richly detailed depiction of the brittle, brilliant world of pre-Civil War England and the forces that blew it apart… Dinshaw’s telling of this story is a bravura performance in historical narration. He has a novelist’s eye for place and character, and his elegantly crafted prose is bright with freshly minted phrases. – John Adamson * Literary Review *An outstanding dual biography… Dinshaw’s book is profoundly entertaining, startling in its depth, and a necessary cautionary tale about the human cost of political division – Daniel Brookes * The Telegraph *Humane and sympathetic… Many accounts of the civil wars are military histories. Dinshaw’s is refreshingly different…. This is a story about young men, the years that formed them and the way that history, still, makes us choose sides – Alice Hunt * The Times *A zest for gossip; antiquarianism; a delight in networks and family trees and piquant coincidences; a penchant for trains of thought which, rather than travelling compulsively forward like a railway train, stray about like a mule-train of hungry animals released into a field full of clover: these are unusual attributes for a chronicler of great public events. They make Dinshaw an informative and engaging historian, and an extremely idiosyncratic one – Lucy Hughes-Hallett * New Statesman *Moving as well as erudite Friends in Youth builds an eloquent butelegiac portrait of well-meaning moderates who tried to halt the slide towards violent division. – Boyd Tonkin * The FT *The triumph of Friends in Youth is that it doesn’t conceive of itself as a joint biography of two important men set against a background of “History”. Instead, it is History that is front and centre… [Dinshaw finds] fascinating human interest stories among the large cast of minor characters – Kathryn Hughes * The Guardian *

An elegant and humane work of considerable literary and historical polish… a book ofengaging originality, covering one of the most traumatic and formative eras in British history

Minoo Dinshaw lives in London and is the author of the highly acclaimed Outlandish Knight- The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman.