Review: Edward Mendelson on “The Last Englishmen”

For readers with literary interests, Deborah Baker’s The Last Englishmen: Love, War, and the End of Empire, may seem like a dispatch from an alternate universe. Two of the main characters are Auden and Spender, but they are scientists and mountaineers working in India, not poets working in England and America. John B. Auden, a geologist, was older broth…