Viewed in the West as a time of self-confident progress, the Victorian period was experienced by Asians as a catastrophe. As the British gunned down the last heirs to the Mughal Empire, burned down the Summer Palace in Beijing, or humiliated the bankrupt rulers of the Ottoman Empire, it was clear that for Asia to recover a new way of thinking would be required. Pankaj Mishra\`s fascinating, highly entertaining new book tells the story of a remarkable group of men from across the continent who met the challenge of the West. Incessantly travelling, questioning and agonising, they both hated the West and recognised that an Asian renaissance needed to be fuelled in part by engagement with the enemy. Through many setbacks and wrong turns, a powerful, contradictory and ultimately unstoppable series of ideas were created that now lie behind everything from the Chinese Communist Party to Al Qaeda, from Indian nationalism to the Muslim Brotherhood.From the Ruins of Empire allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew, through the eyes of these journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics, who created the ideas which in turn were to doom the new empires, and which lie behind the powerful Asian nations of the twenty-first century today.\`It is impossible in a short form to do justice to... the intrepid and endlessly questioning spirit which lies behind his book.\` Hilary Mantel on Temptations of the West, New York Review of Books