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 of
engaging 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.

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