How are great turning points in history experienced by individuals?

As Britain pulls away from Europe great British writers come together to give voice to their innermost feelings. These writers include novelists, writers of books for children, of comic books, humourists, historians, biographers, nature writers, film writers, travel writers, writers young and old and from an extraordinary range of backgrounds. Most are famous perhaps because they have won the Booker or other literary prizes, written bestsellers, changed the face of popular culture or sold millions of records. Others are not yet household names but write with depth of insight and feeling.

There is some extraordinary writing in this book. Some of these pieces are expressions of love of particular places in Europe. Some are true stories, some nostalgic, some hopeful. Some are cries of pain. There are hilarious pieces. There are cries of pain and regret. Some pieces are quietly devastating. All are passionate.

Conceived as a love letter to Europe, this book may also help reawaken love for Britain. It shows the unique richness and diversity of British cultures, a multitude of voices in harmony.

Contributors include:
Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Philip Ardagh, Jake Arnott, Patricia Atkinson, Paul Atterbury, Richard Beard, Mary Beard, Don Boyd, Melvyn Bragg, Gyles Brandreth, Kathleen Burke, James Buxton, Philip Carr, Brian Catling, Shami Chakrabarti, Chris Cleave, Mark Cocker, Peter Conradi , Heather Cooper, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Roger Crowley, David Crystal, William Dalrymple, Lindsey Davies, Margaret Drabble, Mark Ellen, Richard Evans, Michel Faber, Sebastian Faulks, Ranulph Fiennes, Robert Fox, James Fox, Neil Gaiman, Evelyn Glennie, James Hanning, Nick Hayes, Alan Hollinghurst, Gabby Hutchinson-Crouch, Will Hutton, Robert Irwin, Holly Johnson , Liane Jones, Ruth Jones, Sam Jordison, Kapka Kassabova, AL Kennedy, Hermione Lee, Prue Leith, Patrick Lenox, Roger Lewis, David Lindo, Penelope Lively, Beth Lync, Richard Mabey, Sue MacGregor, Ian Martin, Frank McDonough, Jonathan Meades, Andrew Miller, Deborah Moggach, Ben Moor, Alan Moore, Paul Morley, Jackie Morris, Charles Nicholl, Richard Overy, Chris Riddell, Adam Roberts, Tony Robinson, Lee Rourke, Sophie Sabbage, Marcus Sedgwick, Richard Shirreff, Paul Stanford, Isy Suttie, Sandi Toksvig, Colin Tudge, Ed Vulliamy, Anna Whitelock, Kate Williams, Michael Wood, Louisa Young

William Dalrymple, who wrote so magically about India in ‘City of Djinns’, returns to the country in a series of remarkable essays.

Featured in its pages are 15-year-old guerrilla girls and dowager Maharanis; flashy Bombay drinks parties and violent village blood feuds; a group of vegetarian terrorists intent on destroying India’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet; and a palace where port and cigars are still carried to guests on a miniature silver steam train.

Dalrymple meets such figures as Imran Khan and Benazir Bhutto; he witnesses the macabre nightly offering to the bloodthirsty goddess Parashakti – She Who Is Seated on a Throne of Five Corpses; he experiences caste massacres in the badlands of Bihar and dines with a drug baron on the North-West Frontier; he discovers such oddities as the terrorist apes of Jaipur and the shrine where Lord Krishna is said to make love every night to his 16,108 wives and 64,732 milkmaids.

‘The Age of Kali’ is the fourth fascinating volume from the author of ‘In Xanadu’, ‘City of Djinns’ and ‘From the Holy Mountain’.

A rich blend of history and spirituality, adventure and politics, laced with the thread of black comedy familiar to readers of William Dalrymple’s previous work.

In AD 587, two monks, John Moschos and Sophronius the Sophist, embarked on an extraordinary journey across the Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. Their aim: to collect the wisdom of the sages and mystics of the Byzantine East before their fragile world shattered under the eruption of Islam. Almost 1500 years later, using the writings of John Moschos as his guide, William Dalrymple set off to retrace their footsteps.

Taking in a civil war in Turkey, the ruins of Beirut, the tensions of the West Bank and a fundamentalist uprising in Egypt, William Dalrymple’s account is a stirring elegy to the dying civilisation of Eastern Christianity.

From the author of the Samuel Johnson prize-shortlisted ‘Return of a King’, the romantic and ultimately tragic tale of a passionate love affair that transcended all the cultural, religious and political boundaries of its time.

James Achilles Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at the court of Hyderabad when he met Khair un-Nissa – ‘Most Excellent among Women’ – the great-niece of the Prime Minister of Hyderabad. He fell in love with her and overcame many obstacles to marry her, converting to Islam and, according to Indian sources, becoming a double-agent working against the East India Company.

It is a remarkable story, but such things were not unknown: from the early sixteenth century to the eve of the Indian Mutiny, the ‘white Mughals’ who wore local dress and adopted Indian ways were a source of embarrassment to successive colonial administrations. Dalrymple unearths such colourful figures as ‘Hindoo Stuart’, who travelled with his own team of Brahmins to maintain his temple of idols, and Sir David Auchterlony, who took all 13 of his Indian wives out for evening promenades, each on the back of her own elephant.

In ‘White Mughals’, William Dalrymple discovers a world almost entirely unexplored by history, and places at its centre a compelling tale of seduction and betrayal.

One of the most successful, influential and acclaimed travel books of recent years from the author of ‘Return of a King’, which has been shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize.

At the age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. This is an account of a quest which took him and his companions across the width of Asia, along dusty, forgotten roads, through villages and cities full of unexpected hospitality and wildly improbable escapades, to Coleridge’s Xanadu itself.
At once funny and knowledgeable, In Xanadu is in the finest tradition of British travel writing. Told with an exhilarating blend of eloquence, wit, poetry and delight, it is already established as a classic of its kind.