Welcome

Welcome to the website of William Dalrymple, the writer and historian

William's new book – The Last Mughal: The Eclipse of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 – is published by Bloomsbury and has just won the prestigous Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography 2007.

You can download an extract (MS Word format), or order the book from Amazon.

Reviews of The Last Mughal

Click here for a full list of recent reviews.

“William Dalrymple’s captivating book is not only great reading, it contributes very substantially too our understanding of the remarkable history of The Mughal empire in its dying days … It is rare indeed that a work of such consummate scholarship and insight could also be so accessible and such fun to read.”

Amartya Sen

“[Dalrymple] builds an urban narrative as evocative as Richard Cobb’s depiction of Revolutionary Paris … There is so much to admire in this book – the depth of historical research, the finely evocative writing, the extraordinary rapport with the cultural world of late Mughal India. It is also in many ways a remarkably humane and egalitarian history … This is a splendid work of empathetic scholarship. As the 150th anniversary of the uprising dawns there will be many attempts to revisit these bloody, chaotic, cataclysmic events; but few reinterpretations of 1857 will be as bold, as insightful, or as challenging as this.”

David Arnold, Times Literary Supplement