© Columbia University Press
The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre: Victorian Anglo Indian MP and Chancery “Lunatic”
May, 2010
Cloth, 384 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-70108-2
$27.50
"[Fisher] brings back to life one of the strangest, saddest and most unlikely stories of the entire British-India encounter." — William Dalrymple, The Observer
"Michael Fisher’s biography . . . makes fascinating reading." — Shrabani Basu, H-Asia
"This is a quintessentially nineteenth-century story reminding me of the kinds of entanglements so central to Charles Dickens's Bleak House. The tale has a novelistic quality that Michael H. Fisher adroitly brings alive even as his scholarly voice reminds us of the bigger stories that lie behind this tragic life." — Philippa Levine, University of Texas at Austin
"An incredibly engaging story, one that focuses not only on Dyce Sombre's controversial career in Britain, but also on his Indian childhood and subsequent movements through the Malay Straits, Singapore, Macau, China, continental Europe, and the Ottoman Empire. Sombre is a wonderful protagonist and Michael H. Fisher should be lauded for recovering the richness and strangeness of this individual's life." — Tony Ballantyne, Washington University, St. Louis
"An extraordinary story, richly and vividly told. Ranging from North India to Paris, from the Indian to the British aristocracy, from boudoir to law court, this book is an intimate portrait of a man living between many worlds. Immensely entertaining, it explores important questions about status, race, gender, ideas of property and insanity, and empire and identity." — Peter Robb, School of Oriental and African Studies
"This book takes the reader through the gripping career of a remarkable early nineteenth-century cosmopolitan. A fascinating social history that inaugurates a new genre of biographical writing focusing on the global via the individual." — Seema Alavi, Delhi University