Praise for Return of a King

Fiammetta Rocco, The Economist

“Dalrymple, probably the best known British historian of India, has written eight acclaimed books on a wide variety of subjects, but this is the book he was born to write.”

John Darwin, The New York Times

“Ever since this fiasco, an entire phalanx of writers has denounced the arrogance, folly and incompetence of the British aggressors. The latest and most brilliant in this long line of critics is William Dalrymple and his Return of a King ... Those who have read his White Mughals and The Last Mughal will know what to expect: a readable style, a deep humanity and, above all, an extraordinary skill in evoking the lost worlds of Mughals and Afghans... Return of a King is much the fullest and most powerful description of the West’s first encounter with Afghan society ... Dalrymple is in no doubt about the moral horror of the British invasion. But he is too good a historian to fall back on polemic. The cruelty and treachery with which Afghans treated one another is crisply portrayed ... His pen-portraits are a masterpiece ...”
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David Gilmour, New York Review of Books

“Splendid and absorbing … William Dalrymple tells this tragic story with verve, skill, and—unexpectedly in the circumstances—some humor. Using unknown or underused sources from India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, he recounts the tale from both sides, shifting the scenes, using eyewitness accounts, quoting at length heroic epic poems … This fine book."”
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