William Dalrymple

Return of a King (eBook, ePUB)

The Battle for Afghanistan

• Format: ePub

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 Telegraph
A 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, 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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK
• Seitenzahl: 608
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. Februar 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781408828434
• Artikelnr.: 38283696

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.

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