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In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English merchants who collected taxes using a ruthless private army, this new regime saw the East India Company transform itself from an international trading corporation into something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business.
William Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.
A revised edition of a classic title, now with digitally restored
photographs, showcasing the finest surviving examples of ancient
Buddhist art. Since their chance re-discovery in 1819, the
breathtaking paintings and sculptures of the Ajanta caves have
inspired and delighted experts and amateurs alike. Ranging in date
from the second century BCE to the sixth century CE, these ancient
Buddhist artworks rank among the world’s most important cultural
treasures. Benoy K. Behl captured the beauty and luminosity of
these works using long exposures and only natural light and now
presents them here digitally restored to show the paintings closer
to their original glory than ever before. The exquisite murals,
depicting the tales of previous incarnations of Buddha, scenes of
princely processions and fantastical birds and beasts, provide
virtually the only evidence of painting styles that first developed
in India and remain crucially important to the understanding of
Buddhist art throughout Asia. On UNESCO’s list of World Heritage
Sites, the Ajanta caves survive as a potent symbol of the great
beauty of India’s rich artistic past. This new edition provides
for the first time a view of some of the masterpieces of Ajanta
painstakingly digitally restored by Behl. Sensitively carried out,
the restoration makes the paintings clearer without interfering
with their original grace and nuance, leading to a deeper
appreciation of their artistry. Accompanied by expert commentaries
to fully immerse the reader in the cultural context of the murals,
this book will help preserve the legacy of the glorious art of
Ajanta for years to come.
Alive with the mayhem of the present and sparkling with William Dalrymple’s irrepressible wit, 'City of Djinns' is a fascinating portrait of a city. Watched over and protected by the mischievous, invisible djinns, Delhi has, through their good offices, been saved from destruction many times over the centuries. With an extraordinary array of characters, from elusive eunuchs to the last remnants of the Raj, Dalrymple’s second book is a unique and dazzling feat of research. Over the course of a year he comes to know the bewildering city intimately, and brilliantly conveys its magical nature, peeling back successive layers of history, and interlacing innumerable stories from Delhi’s past and present.
A rich blend of history and spirituality, adventure and politics,
laced with the thread of black comedy familiar to readers of
William Dalrymple's previous work. In AD 587, two monks, John
Moschos and Sophronius the Sophist, embarked on an extraordinary
journey across the Byzantine world, from the shores of the
Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. Their aim: to collect the
wisdom of the sages and mystics of the Byzantine East before their
fragile world shattered under the eruption of Islam. Almost 1500
years later, using the writings of John Moschos as his guide,
William Dalrymple set off to retrace their footsteps. Taking in a
civil war in Turkey, the ruins of Beirut, the tensions of the West
Bank and a fundamentalist uprising in Egypt, William Dalrymple's
account is a stirring elegy to the dying civilisation of Eastern
Christianity.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2013 'Dazzling' Sunday
Times 'Magnificent' Guardian 'Sparkling' Daily Telegraph In the
spring of 1839, Britain invaded Afghanistan for the first time.
Nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through
the high mountain passes and re-established on the throne Shah
Shuja ul-Mulk. On the way in, the British faced little resistance.
But after two years of occupation, the Afghan people rose in answer
to the call for jihad and the country exploded into violent
rebellion. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in Britain's greatest
military humiliation of the nineteenth century: an entire army of
the then most powerful nation in the world ambushed in retreat and
utterly routed by poorly equipped tribesmen. Using a range of
forgotten Afghan and Indian sources, William Dalrymple's masterful
retelling of Britain's greatest imperial disaster is a powerful
parable of colonial ambition and cultural collision, folly and
hubris. Return of a King is history at its most urgent and
important. 'As taut and richly embroidered as a great novel ...
this book is a masterpiece' Sunday Telegraph
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A Love Letter to Europe - An outpouring of sadness and hope - Mary Beard, Shami Chakrabati, Sebastian Faulks, Neil Gaiman, Ruth Jones, J.K. Rowling, Sandi Toksvig and others (Hardcover)
Frank Cottrell Boyce, William Dalrymple, Margaret Drabble, Simon Callow, Tony Robinson, …
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Great writers, artists, musicians and thinkers in British life say
what Europe means to them: an outpouring of love and sadness. With
pieces from Frank Cottrell Boyce, Melvyn Bragg, Margaret Drabble,
Alan Hollinghurst, Will Hutton, Holly Johnson, Penelope Lively,
Jonathan Meades, Deborah Moggach, Alan Moore, Jackie Morris, Cathy
Rentzenbrink, Chris Riddle, Tony Robinson, Pete Townshend, Kate
Williams, Michael Wood and many more... As Britain pulls away from
Europe great British writers come together to give voice to their
innermost feelings. Contributing essays that contain some of their
finest writings and perspectives very different to the ones given
in news outlets. The creative community here has its say on Brexit.
Novelists, artists, comedians, historians, biographers, nature
writers, film writers, travel writers, people young and old and
from an extraordinary range of backgrounds. Most are famous perhaps
because they have won the Booker or other literary prizes, written
bestsellers, changed the face of popular culture or sold millions
of records. Others are not yet household names but write with depth
of insight and feeling. There is some extraordinary writing in this
book. Some of these pieces are expressions of love of particular
places in Europe. Some are true stories, some nostalgic, many
hopeful. There are hilarious pieces. There are cries of pain and
regret. Some pieces are quietly devastating. All are passionate.
They show how Europe has helped us to expand our emotional,
intellectual and artistic bandwidth, and hopefully will continue to
do just that. Contributors include: Mary Beard, Jeffrey Boakye,
Melvyn Bragg, Simon Callow, B. Catling, Shami Chakrabarti, Chris
Cleave, Frank Cottrell Boyce, William Dalrymple, Lindsey Davis,
Margaret Drabble, Tracey Emin, Michel Faber, Sebastian Faulks, Neil
Gaiman, Evelyn Glennie, Alan Hollinghurst, Will Hutton, Holly
Johnson, Ruth Jones, A.L. Kennedy, Hermione Lee, Prue Leith, Roger
Lewis, Penelope Lively, Richard Mabey, Jonathan Meades, Andrew
Miller, Deborah Moggach, Alan Moore, Paul Morley, Jackie Morris,
Charles Nicholl, Irenosen Okojie, Onjali Q. Rauf, Chris Riddell,
Tony Robinson, J.K. Rowling, Rhik Samadder, Isy Suttie, Sandi
Toksvig, Pete Townshend, Kate Williams and Michael Wood.
'Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel
what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to
feel anything when they look at your pictures' - Don McCullin Sir
Donald McCullin's Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor is driven by an
eye for beauty and an ear for history. On his 5,000-mile travels in
western Turkey he works his ineffable magic, moving from a
sanctuary known to Homer to the broken face of an exhausted Roman
emperor, before turning his eye on the sensuous torso of a goddess.
While most of us were sheltering from Covid, Don explored the
mountains, valleys and coast of western Turkey, hunting out the
most poignant and powerful ruins of the Roman Empire. He has
created a meditation on landscape, the effects of light on ancient
stone, the way clouds animate the past, but this book is also
inescapably about conquest, imperium and power. Journeys Across
Roman Asia Minor reveals a world full of wonder. We see pavements
once trodden by Aristotle and Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar,
St Paul and the Emperor Hadrian. Through his lens we discover
ancient theatres cascading down the slopes of mountains,
2,000-year-old bridges used by hill farmers to this day, and spring
water flowing into fountains still dominated by statues of the
gods. Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor is consciously focused on
just one specific period within Turkey's dazzlingly rich parade of
historical cultures (that stretch back over 12,000 years), but by
choosing the 500 years of the Roman Empire, we can also celebrate a
time that we can all share in. Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor is
a companion to an earlier volume, Southern Frontiers, where Don had
observed the landscapes of the Roman Empire in North Africa and
Syria.Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor was created through a series
of journeys across western Turkey commissioned by Cornucopia
Magazine. His companion during all these journeys was the writer
Barnaby Rogerson, who was not only able to watch the master at work
but was able to listen to the astonishing tales from Don's
adventurous life, as they travelled along Roman roads. So we get
the context and the historical story behind every chosen
photograph. Don McCullin has won himself the reputation of being
one of the greatest living photographers of conflict, but this has
always co-existed with his other role as a great traveller. He also
takes pride in the craft, so he delights in developing all his own
film. The far frontiers of the Roman Empire are a lifelong
obsession that had been accidentally been kick-started by an
incident in his early career when he worked alongside Bruce
Chatwin.
At the age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. This is an account of a quest which took him and his companions across the width of Asia, along dusty, forgotten roads, through villages and cities full of unexpected hospitality and wildly improbable escapades, to Coleridge’s Xanadu itself. At once funny and knowledgeable, In Xanadu is in the finest tradition of British travel writing. Told with an exhilarating blend of eloquence, wit, poetry and delight, it is already established as a classic of its kind.
'White Mughals' is the romantic and ultimately tragic tale of a passionate love affair that crossed and transcended all the cultural, religious and political boundaries of its time. James Achilles Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad when in 1798 he glimpsed Kahir un-Nissa – 'Most excellent among Women' – the great-niece of the Nizam's Prime Minister and a descendant of the Prophet. Kirkpatrick had gone out to India as an ambitious soldier in the army of the East India Company, eager to make his name in the conquest and subjection of the subcontinent. Instead, he fell in love with Khair and overcame many obstacles to marry her – not least of which was the fact that she was locked away in purdah and engaged to a local nobleman. Eventually, while remaining Resident, Kirkpatrick converted to Islam, and according to Indian sources even became a double-agent working for the Hyderabadis against the East India Company. It is a remarkable story, involving secret assignations, court intrigue, harem politics, religious and family disputes. But such things were not unknown; from the early sixteenth century, when the Inquisition banned the Portuguese in Goa from wearing the dhoti, to the eve of the Indian mutiny, the 'white Mughals' who wore local dress and adopted Indian ways were a source of embarrassments to successive colonial administrations. William Dalrymple unearths such colourful figures as 'Hindoo Stuart', who travelled with his own team of Brahmins to maintain his temple of idols, and who spent many years trying to persuade the memsahibs of Calcutta to adopt the sari; and Sir David Ochterlony, Kirkpatrick's counterpart in Delhi, who took all thirteen of his wives out for evening promenades, each on the back of their own elephant. In 'White Mughals', William Dalrymple discovers a world almost entirely unexplored by history, and places at its centre a compelling tale of love, seduction and betrayal. It possesses all the sweep and resonance of a great nineteenth-century novel, set against a background of shifting alliances and the manoeuvring of the great powers, the mercantile ambitions of the British and the imperial dreams of Napoleon. 'White Mughals', the product of five years' writing and research, triumphantly confirms Dalrymple's reputation as one of the finest writers at work today.
In the spring of A.D. 587, John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius
the Sophist embarked on a remarkable expedition across the entire
Byzantine world, traveling from the shores of Bosphorus to the sand
dunes of Egypt. Using Moschos's writings as his guide and
inspiration, the acclaimed travel writer William Dalrymple retraces
the footsteps of these two monks, providing along the way a moving
elegy to the slowly dying civilization of Eastern Christianity and
to the people who are struggling to keep its flame alive. The
result is Dalrymple's unsurpassed masterpiece: a beautifully
written travelogue, at once rich and scholarly, moving and
courageous, overflowing with vivid characters and hugely topical
insights into the history, spirituality and the fractured politics
of the Middle East.
According to the ancient Hindu scriptures, history is divided into four epochs. As William Dalrymple was told again and again on his travels around the Indian subcontinent, the region is now in the throes of the 'Kali Yug', the Age of Kali, an epoch of darkness and disintegration. In such an age normal conventions fall apart: anything is possible. 'The Age of Kali' is the distillation of ten years’ relentless travelling around the length and breadth of the subcontinent, from the fortresses of the drug barons of the North-West Frontier to the jungle lairs of the Tamil Tigers, from the decaying palaces of Hyderabad to the Keralan exorcist temple of the bloodthirsty goddess Parashakti – She Who is Seated on a Throne of Five Corpses. Everywhere Dalrymple finds an ancient landscape overwhelmed by change, where the old certainties have been swept away, but where a new order has yet to fully establish itself. In some places the disintegration typical of the Age of Kali has reached almost apocalyptic proportions. In Lucknow Dalrymple finds a war being fought between rival wings of the student union, each side being armed with grenades and assault rifles; in neighbouring Bihar he finds the state has totally succumbed to a tidal wave of violence, corruption and endemic caste warfare. Courageous, compassionat, erudite and beautifully written, laced with a thread of William Dalrymple’s characteristic black humour, 'The Age of Kali' is a 'tour de force' of intellectual curiosity, direct observation and unprejudiced enquiry. Essential reading for anyone who wants to come to terms with India, it will further enhance Dalrymple’s reputation as the most formidable travel writer of his generation.
A Best Book of the Year: "The Economist," "Slate," "Kirkus
Reviews"
In 1839, nearly 20,000 British troops poured through the mountain
passes into Afghanistan and installed the exiled Shah Shuja on the
throne as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the
Afghans exploded into rebellion. The British were forced to
retreat--and were then ambushed in the mountains by simply-equipped
Afghan tribesmen. Just one British man made it through. But
Dalrymple takes us beyond the story of this colonial humiliation
and illuminates the key connections between then and now. Shah
Shuja and President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage;
the Shah's principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today
make up the bulk of the Taliban's foot soldiers. Dalrymple explains
the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan's age-old tribal rivalries,
their stranglehold on politics, and how they ensnared both the
British of the nineteenth century and NATO forces today. Rich with
newly discovered primary sources, this stunning narrative is the
definitive account of the first battle for Afghanistan.
The first comprehensive and authoritative history of the
Koh-i-Noor, arguably the most celebrated and mythologised jewel in
the world. On 29 March 1849, the ten-year-old maharaja of the
Punjab was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at the centre
of the great fort in Lahore. There, in a public ceremony, the
frightened but dignified child handed over great swathes of the
richest country in India in a formal Act of Submission to a private
corporation, the East India Company. He was also compelled to hand
over to the British monarch, Queen Victoria, perhaps the single
most valuable object on the subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i Noor
diamond. The Mountain of Light. The history of the Koh-i-Noor that
was then commissioned by the British may have been one woven
together from gossip of Delhi bazaars, but it was to become the
accepted version. Only now is it finally challenged, freeing the
diamond from the fog of mythology that has clung to it for so long.
The resulting history is one of greed, murder, torture, colonialism
and appropriation told through an impressive slice of south and
central Asian history. It ends with the jewel in its current
controversial setting: in the crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen
Mother. Masterly, powerful and erudite, this is history at its most
compelling and invigorating.
William Dalrymple's award-winning first book: his classic, fiercely
intelligent and wonderfully entertaining account of his journey
across Marco Polo's 700-year-old route from Jerusalem to Xanadu,
the summer palace of Kubla Khan.
At the age of twenty-two, Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge
to travel to the ruins of Kubla Khan's stately pleasure dome in
Xanadu. As he and his companions travel across the width of
Asia--crossing through Acre, Aleppo, Tabriz, Tashkurgan, and other
mysterious and sometimes hellish places--they encounter dusty,
forgotten roads, unexpected hospitality, and difficult challenges.
Stylish, witty, and knowledgeable about everything from the dreaded
order of Assassins to the hidden origins of the Three Magi, this is
travel writing at its best.
In this evocative study of the fall of the Mughal Empire and the
beginning of the Raj, award-winning historian William Dalrymple
uses previously undiscovered sources to investigate a pivotal
moment in history.
The last Mughal emperor, Zafar, came to the throne when the
political power of the Mughals was already in steep decline.
Nonetheless, Zafar--a mystic, poet, and calligrapher of great
accomplishment--created a court of unparalleled brilliance, and
gave rise to perhaps the greatest literary renaissance in modern
Indian history. All the while, the British were progressively
taking over the Emperor's power. When, in May 1857, Zafar was
declared the leader of an uprising against the British, he was
powerless to resist though he strongly suspected that the action
was doomed. Four months later, the British took Delhi, the capital,
with catastrophic results. With an unsurpassed understanding of
British and Indian history, Dalrymple crafts a provocative,
revelatory account of one the bloodiest upheavals in history.
A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of
Tibet - then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the
violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain
nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend
ritually starve herself to death. Nine people, nine lives; each one
taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story.
William Dalrymple delves deep into the heart of a nation torn
between the relentless onslaught of modernity and the ancient
traditions that endure to this day. LONGLISTED FOR THE BBC SAMUEL
JOHNSON PRIZE
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