Koh-i-Noor is a trifling bauble in Indian history

Dr Anil Seal, who has been a history don at Trinity College, Cambridge, for some 50 years, dismisses the Koh-i-Noor diamond as a mere "bauble in the annals of history". He was speaking last week as a member of a panel which discussed Dr Kartar Lalvani's very pro-British new book, The Making of India: The Untold Story of British Enterprise (Bloomsbury; £25), for which an Indian edition is now out.

"What if the British had not come to India?" is one of the intriguing questions analysed by a panel that included Seal and fellow historian Andrew Roberts, former war correspondent and member of Parliament Martin Bell, plus Lady Shree Flather.

The star of the show was undoubtedly Seal, one of the founders of the "Cambridge School of Indian History" and the author of The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century .

Turning to Kartar, Seal summed up all that was good, bad and ugly about the Raj: "From a historical standpoint let us accept that empires are not conquered to be kept in glass cages - they are conquered or acquired for profit, power and for prestige. No one goes abroad in order to make it a philanthropic mission.

"I entirely accept - and that is why I respect your book - that there were among the people who were sent out on an imperial mission - and particularly the civil servants - those who actually believed that they were doing good. And the fact that they were ruthlessly and hypocritically misguided by their rulers - Perfidious Albion - does not mean that the people who arrived there did not care about their jobs and wanted to do good. The railways that you mentioned were built primarily to move troops from one part of the country to another so that the mutiny, if it ever happened again, would be quickly put down."

Seal added: "It is time for all of us - and I am proud of my Indian citizenship even being diasporic - to take responsibility for all our enormous faults. We are one of the most racist countries in the world. We are one of the most hierarchical and most colour conscious countries in the world; we are one of the most evil countries in the treatment of elites to the people below them, (and) corrupt.

"Can we blame this on the Brits? Answer no. Can we blame ourselves? Answer yes."

The namesake

There is still quite a lot of mystery about Anoushka Sharma, the woman who has married rock star Mick Jagger's son, James.

There is nothing for Virat Kohli to get agitated about because this Anoushka Sharma is quite different from the Bollywood actress of the same name.

Anoushka, 28, and James, 30, a musician-cum-actor, had a wedding ceremony last week at a stately home called Cornwell Manor in Chipping Norton in the scenic Oxfordshire-Gloucestershire border.

Sir Mick, 72, was there with his ex, James's mother, Jerry Hall, the 59-year-old former Texan model, and her new husband, Rupert Murdoch, the 85-year-old media tycoon.

Anoushka was "given away" by Gabriel Jagger, her husband's 18-year-old brother. This is a duty that is normally performed by the bride's father or a male relative. But as far as one could tell from the photographs of the 200 guests present, the bride's family seemed conspicuous by their absence.

It seems Anoushka is from Birmingham, and that she and James met when she was working in a jewellery shop owned by Jade Jagger, 44, Mick's daughter from his first marriage to Bianca De Macias, a Nicaraguan. Some have remarked that Anoushka bears a resemblance to Bianca.

Anoushka and James, who have been together for seven years and live in the US, underwent marriage number one in an open air ceremony in New York last September. It is a good sign that James, unlike his father, prefers to remain low profile.

Relative value

Anoushka Shankar, 34, daughter of the late Ravi Shankar, and her English film director husband, Joe Wright, 43 - his credits include Pride & Prejudice (2005), Atonement (2007) and Anna Karenina (2012) - met in William Dalrymple's home in Delhi in 2009.

Wright had come to do research on a film about Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, which never got made, but within a year he had married Anoushka, with whom he has two sons, Zubin, 5, and Mohan, 1.

The couple speak about each other in "Relative Values", a regular Sunday Times column which is usually about relatives - fathers and daughters or mothers and sons, for example - but the paper has made an exception for Wright and Anoushka.

Anoushka remembers: "I suppose I knew he was 'the one' pretty quickly."

Wright recalls Ravi Shankar was fastidious when he first encountered Wright when he stayed over. "We had, of course, been consigned to separate bedrooms. He asked if I had slept well, then said, 'Do you wash every day?' I told him yes. After a pause, he said, 'All over, or just hands and face?' The Indians think the British don't wash very well, you see. So I was relieved that my ablutions met with approval."

Stalking novel

Nicholas Parsons was the surprise celebrity guest when the psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud launched his debut novel last week at the offices of the London Review of Books.

Parsons, who wore a striped jacket, is 92 but still presents a popular programme on BBC Radio 4 called Just a Minute, in which contestants have to speak for 60 seconds "without hesitation, repetition or deviation".

The programme went to Mumbai in 2012 when the contestants were Paul Merton and Marcus Brigstocke from Britain, while Anuvab Pal and Cyrus Broacha represented India.

Persaud's novel, Can't Get You Out of My Head, is set against the background of stalking - it happens "when a man can't take 'no' from a woman", often an ex-partner.

All proceeds from the sales of the book will go to the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which was set up by Paul and Diana Lamplugh in memory of their daughter who disappeared on July 28, 1986.

Suzy, a very attractive woman of 25, was an estate agent who made an appointment to show a client called "Mr Kipper" around a house for sale in Fulham, West London - and was never seen again.

Bard in India

As part of the events marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, Vishal Bhardwaj has been in London to discuss his adaptations of Macbeth , Othello and Hamlet - namely, Maqbool, Omkara and Haider, respectively.

During a Q&A to discuss "Indian Shakespeare on Screen" at Asia House, Bhardwaj revealed that he wanted to make a gangster movie but wasn't sure of the story. On a train journey he began to read a children's book, Tales from Shakespeare , by Charles and Mary Lamb.

After reading about Macbeth, he rang scriptwriter Abbas Tyrewalla and said: "I have the subject of my next film."

Tittle tattle

If opinion polls are to be trusted, Sadiq Khan, Labour MP for Tooting, should beat the Tory candidate, Zac Goldsmith, MP for Richmond Park and North Kingston, in London's mayoral election on Thursday, May 5, after a pretty disreputable "Anyone but a Muslim" campaign against the former.