SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Return of a King - The Battle for Afghanistan

William Dalrymple

Meet the author and buy signed copies of his book.

Synopsis

Return of a King is a history which resonates with contemporary politics and reads like a richly drawn novel. Using previously undiscovered Afghan sources, here for the first time is the full picture of Britain’s disastrous adventure in Afghanistan, which asks: have we learnt anything from history? With a driving narrative and a complex cast of characters- shahs, amirs, sepoys, British generals, Russian ambassadors- Return of a King is the must-read history of 2013.

Speaker biography

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 and has three times been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. 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.

In the spring of 1839, British forces invaded Afghanistan for the first time. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed shakos, 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.

Admission

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