William Dalrymple

Return of a King

The Battle for Afghanistan

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2013'As taut and richly embroidered as a great novel . . . a masterpiece' Sunday Telegraph'Dazzling' Sunday Times 'Magnificent' Guardian 'Sparkling' Daily TelegraphA towering history of the first Afghan War by bestselling historian William Dalrymple.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, WilliamDalrymple'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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Trade
• Artikelnr. des Verlages: 156618
• Seitenzahl: 608
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. Januar 2014
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 198mm x 128mm x 40mm
• Gewicht: 540g
• ISBN-13: 9781408831595
• ISBN-10: 1408831597
• Artikelnr.: 39416275

Autorenporträt

William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain, The Age of Kali, White Mughals, The Last Mughal and, most recently, Nine Lives. He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the French Prix d'Astrolabe, the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Award, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Asia House Award for Asian Literature, the Vodafone Crossword Award for non-fiction, the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage, and has, prior to the shortlisting of Return of a King, been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize three times. In 2012 he was appointed Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University. He lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.

Rezensionen

This sorry saga has been recounted many times, but never that I can recall as well as by Dalrymple. He is a master story-teller, whose special gift lies in the use of indigenous sources, so often neglected by imperial chroniclers Max Hastings Sunday Times

Brilliant . . . even 170 years later, the events described in Return of a King still have the power to shock - and so they should. It is to be hoped that any future British leader contemplating intervention in Afghanistan, or any other part of the Muslim world, will read Dalrymple's book