The LRB podcast is sponsored by Art and Ideas, a podcast series featuring J. Paul Getty Trust President Jim Cuno in conversation with artists, writers, curators and scholars.

In the latest episode, Ankar Moolstein, author of The Pen and the Brush, how Passion for Art shaped 19th century French novels, discusses the symbiotic relationship between authors

and artists in 19th century France. Search Getty Art and Ideas on Apple Podcasts, Google Play or other

podcast sources. It was in 1908 that Lytton Straiti wrote to his new friend Bernard Swithinbank,

I believe as strongly as I believe anything that you oughtn't to go.

Have you thought enough of the horror of the solitude and the wretchedness of every single creature out there

and the degrading influences of those years away from civilization?

I've had experience. I've seen my brothers and what's happened to them, and it's sickening to think of. Straiti was trying,

in vain, as it turned out, to dissuade Swithinbank from going out to India. Straiti's galore

had staffed the Rage throughout the 19th century,

and Lytton's dearest friend Leonard Wolfe had just gone out to Ceylon.

But here, as in so many departments of life,

the wind of change was blowing through Bloomsbury.

From 1912 onwards it was possible not only to talk openly of

seamen and atheism, but also to ridicule the empire as an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

Our imperial destiny was now a subject as ripe for ridicule as the mumbo-jumbo of Christianity.

Strachey argued that the Raj was bad for Britain and the British.

In inglorious empire, Shashi Tarot argues with equal passion that it was much worse for

India and the Indians.

In 1700, when the British were mere

traders clinging on to a few coastal towholds, the Emperor Orang Zeb ruled over a country that

accounted for a quarter of the world's economy. By the time the British left, India's share of

...