Two men on a mountain

A book that opens in a Lahore refugee camp, shifts to Cat Bells Fell, rising above the shores of Derwentwater, and then swoops between the Ranigunj coalfields in Bengal, Belsize Park, a handicrafts exhibition at Kharagpur, Kensington Gore, military intelligence headquarters in Calcutta, an aircraft factory in Wembley and the Himalayas is bound to keep its readers jumping. In The Last Englishmen, Deborah Baker has written an exuberant, scene-changing, shapeshifting group biography, with John Auden and Michael Spender as its chief human protagonists. But she makes the Himalayas, and Mount Everest, palpable and vivid characters in her story too.

John Auden was the geologist elder brother of W.H. Auden and became a global expert on the Himalayas. Michael Spender was the mountaineer elder brother of Wystan Auden’s fellow poet Stephen Spender. He was the chief surveyor of the 1935 reconnaissance mission to Mount Everest, and was the first to survey the northern approach to its summit.

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Both men fell in love in 1938 with an artist named Nancy Sharp, then married to the talented but misogynistic painter William Coldstream and the ex-lover of the poet Louis MacNeice. Michael Spender was able to marry her just a few years before his death in a wartime air-crash. Auden meanwhile married Sheila Bonnerjee, a woman of fine-spun sensibility whose childhood reading had been Shakespeare, Browning, Tennyson and Shelley. Some of the most moving episodes in the book involve the subtle, lustrous, vulnerable Bonnerjee family, whose members had the troubled delicacy that one associates with characters in Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse.

Michael Spender was an egotist with formidable powers of ruthless concentration. On an expedition to Greenland, he was so pompous and overbearing that the other explorers banded together in irrefragable dislike of him.