‘Walking by the banks of the Chao Praya on a breezy evening after a day of intense heat,’ writes Sunil Amrith at the start of his melancholic new book, ‘I struggled to connect the scene before me.’ While the river that flows through Bangkok looked idyllic, ‘crowded with noisy pleasure boats festooned with lights’, Amrith was struck by the realisation that half of the city ‘could be underwater by the end of this century’. This thought was the latest stage in a process that he says has taken him time to work out: ‘I can no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and human freedom that inspired me to become a historian in the first place.’
Rudyard Kipling was appalled by the meat industry, but revelled in the death inflicted by Britain’s imperial armies
The result is The Burning Earth, a volume that bristles with indignation.
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