Professor Martin Green has set himself a bold task. Tolstoy and Gandhi, Men of Peace¹ is the double biography of two extraordinary men, both of whom exerted enormous influence over their contemporaries, combined into what amounts to a single, intertwined “life.” As he explains in his introduction: “The plan of this book is to present the two lives side by side, in all their various phases, in such a way as to reveal the historical forces to which they were always responding.” This results in a succession of parallel phases in which Professor Green detects marked psychological and ideological similarities; he intersperses his discussions of these with expositions of the common ground he finds himself treading.

These parallel periods are of course staggered chronologically, since the lives only partially overlapped. Tolstoy was born in 1828 and died in 1910, while Gandhi was born in 1869 and assassinated in 1948. It goes without saying that the historical overlap is almost wholly marginal. Tolstoy was a Russian, a nobleman, and above all a very great writer. Gandhi was a middle-class Indian, living at a time when his “country” was governed by a tiny minority of Europeans from the other side of the world, and first and foremost a politician. As he wrote, “I myself was born into a family of politicians”; his father was chief minister of a small Gujerati state. There is an unexpected contrast here, for though Tolstoy was a member of the old Russian aristocracy, neither