William Dalrymple, Anita Anand

Koh-i-Noor (eBook, ePUB)

The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

'Riveting. This highly readable and entertaining book ... finally sets the record straight on the history of the Koh-i-Noor' Tarquin Hall, Sunday Times
'Dynamic, original and supremely readable' Maya Jasanoff, Guardian

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 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, which was deemed too contentious to be used by Camilla, the Queen Consort, in King Charles's coronation.

Masterly, powerful and erudite, this is history at its most compelling and invigorating.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. Juni 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781408888858
• Artikelnr.: 48413090

Autorenporträt

William Dalrymple is one of Britain's great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton and Brown. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President's Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. William lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.