Shashi Tharoor

The instinctive Indian sense that nothing begins and nothing ends. We are all living in an eternal present in which what was and what will be is contained in what is, or to put it in a more contemporary idiom, that life is a series of sequel to history.

This is my story of the India I know, with its biases, selections, omissions, distortions, all mine.... Every Indian must for ever carry with him, in his head and heart, his own history of India.

The vehicles of human politics seem to run off course, but the site of the accident turns out to have been the intended destination.

The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.

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