"If you're an Indian reading this book in English, it's probably because of ThomasMacaulay, " says the front cover blurb on a new biography of a man who foisted the Queen's language on India.
He wrote as well as anyone since ThomasMacaulay and was a master of the historical essay, a hero to a generation of schoolboys who were raised on his controversies over the rise of the gentry and the origins of the second world war.