Friends in Youth

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

David Robinson, Country Life