History

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize for History 2007Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, a talented poet, and a skilled calligrapher, who, though deprived of real political power by the East India Company, succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance, and presided over one ... More

Clive Bell wrote this book circa the First World War period and proposed to investigate the nature of Britain's leading war-aim ('fighting for civilisation'). The author intends to enquire what this thing is for which whole generations seem to have fought and for which taxpayers pay. In fact this bo... More

The rituals and narratives of Gajan dominate the spring season in the villages of Bengal. It is a ritual of the common village people created from indigenous sources and heavily laden with symbols of fertilization and reproduction. Rites of Spring analyzes the meaning of these narratives and their s... More

A stunning exposé of how A.Q. Khan set up Pakistan’s nuclear programme, and the role of the United States in the spread of nuclear weaponsBased on hundreds of interviews in the United States, Pakistan, India, Israel, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Deception is a masterwork of reportage and dramatic ... More

A nineteenth century French priest discovers something in his mountain village at the foot of The Pyrenees which enabled him to amass and spend a fortune of millions of pounds. The tale seems to begin with buried treasure and then turns into an unprecedented historical detective story - a modern Gra... More

Is the traditional, accepted view of the life of Christ in some way incomplete? - Is it possible Christ did not die on the cross?- Is it possible Jesus was married, a father, and that his bloodline still exists?- Is it possible that parchments found in the South of France a century ago reveal one of... More

As the author of the best travel book of recent years at theintensely irritating age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple has now shown that In Xanadu wasno fluke. City of Djinns is an entertaining mix of history and diaryinformed by a deep curiosity about the ways in which the ghosts  of eventhe m... More

Winner of the 2005 Kiriyama Prize for Non-fictionSuketu Mehta left Bombay at the age of 14. Twenty-one years later he returned to rediscover the city. The result is this stunning, brilliantly illuminating portrait of the megalopolis and its people—a book, seven years in the making, that is as vast... More

In this book Michael Lynch presents an engaging and thoroughaccount of Mao's life and politics, making use of a wealth of primary andsecondary sources. He locates Maoism in the broader context of twentieth-centuryChinese history, discussing the development of the Chinese Communist Party, thecreation... More

‘A wonderful book . . .[a] must for every student of globalization’—N.R. Narayana Murthy, Chairman and Chief Mentor, Infosys technologies Ltd.Since humans migrated from Africa and dispersed throughout the world, they have found countless ways and reasons to reconnect with each other. In this i... More

The partition of India in 1947 promised its people both political freedom and a future free of religious strife. Instead, the geographical divide effected an even greater schism of the population, benefiting the few at the expense of the very many, exposing huge numbers of the population to devastat... More

Winner of the 1989 National Book Award for nonfiction, this extraordinary bestseller is still the most incisive, thought-provoking book ever written about the Middle East. Thomas L. Friedman, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, and now the Foreign Affairs columnist on the... More

An insightful and powerful analysis of the forces driving global politics today and into the next century. In the summer of 1993 Foreign Affairs published an article entitled ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ by Samuel Huntington. No article, according to the editors of that distinguished journal, h... More

India Unbound is the riveting story of a nation’s rise from poverty to prosperity and the clash of ideas that occurred along the way. Today’s India is a vibrant free-market democracy, and it has begun to flex its muscles in the global information economy. The old centralized, bureaucrati... More

These poems by Tagore written primarily to entertain the children moved many contemporary writers. The beauty and simplicity of these poems translated from the Bengali collection of poems Sishu (1903) are very moving. The Globe in its review (1913) described it as 'a revelation more profound and mor... More

These poems by Tagore written primarily to entertain the children moved many contemporary writers. The beauty and simplicity of these poems translated from the Bengali collection of poems Sishu (1903) are very moving. The Globe in its review (1913) described it as 'a revelation more profound and mor... More

In March 1947 Lord Louis Mountbatten became the last Viceroy of India, with the mandate to hand over "the jewel in the crown" of the British Empire within one year. Mountbatten worked with various leaders to devise a plan for partitioning the empire into two independent sovereign states. During the ... More

In his devastating new book Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind takes readers inside the defining conflict of our era: the war between the West and a growing, shadowy army of terrorists, armed with weapons of alarming power. Relying on unique access to former and current government officia... More