Portrait of a Moderate

The growing historical literature on the national movement in India is as yet comparatively poor in good biographical works. Two recent publications—S. Gopal’s Nehru and now B.R. Nanda’s Gokhale—will go a long way in filling this gap. Here is an authoritative, ex­tensively researched, scrupulously fair and extremely well-written biography of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who with Pherozeshah Mehta and Dinshaw Wacha formed the controlling cell within the Indian National Congress from the turn of the twentieth century to the early years of the First World War.