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 -- David Robinson * Country Life *