He was the author of several books including: Younghusband: the Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1994), a biography of Francis Younghusband; The World Is What It Is (2008), an authorised biography of Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul that won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States of America;[1] and India: A Portrait (2011).
[4][5] At the age of 25, French set off on a trail across Central Asia to retrace the steps of British explorer Francis Younghusband.
French's next book, Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division, was published in 1997 and earned the author accolades and brickbats in equal parts.
On the other hand, Philip Ziegler hailed it as "a remarkable achievement",[9] and Khushwant Singh described the author as "a first rate historian and storyteller".
[12] Pico Iyer in the Los Angeles Times book review described French as a "scrupulous and disciplined writer" who "has a decided gift for inspired and heartfelt research and a knack for coming upon overlooked details that are worth several volumes of analysis".
In The New York Review of Books Ian Buruma described French as the inventor of a new genre, "the confessional biography".
[21] He felt the order's motto, "For God and the Empire", would affect perceptions of his writing on South Asian history.