So firmly based upon a close reading of the secondary literature and printed documents, as well as upon archival soundings and interviews, and told with such a sense for the essential drama of the story, that it is easily the most comprehensive and the most interesting history of the Nazi-Soviet pact that we possess. Gordon A. Craig, New York Review of Books"

And yet when independence came on the stroke of midnight of August 14, 1947, events unfolded with a violence that shocked the world: entire trainloads of Muslim and Hindu refugees were slaughtered on their flight to safety -- not by the British, but by each other. Macaulay's dream had become a flawed and bloody reality. The Proudest Day is a riveting account of the end of the Raj, the most romantic of all the great empires. Anthony Read and David Fisher tell the whole epic story in compelling and colorful detail from its beginnings more than a century earlier; their powerful narrative takes a...