The Golden Road

With a mind-boggling mastery of sources, Dalrymple weaves a thrilling tale of Indias cultural hegemony, not forgetting its invention of mathematics and related disciplines still in use today -- Andrew Lycett * Spectator * An outstanding new account of ancient Indias cultural conquest of the globe The Golden Road is an absorbingly literary history, a tale of tales ... Xi Jinpings China is currently much better at promoting itself as the heart of Asia. But it may ultimately prove no match for Indias primordial gift for myth and narrative, and this is what Dalrymple has so successfully channelled into The Golden Road. The plot, especially for South Asians, may be an old one, but its the most compelling retelling we have had for generations * Financial Times * Dazzling ... The Golden Road, teeming with his own evocative descriptions of far-flung cave and forest temples, sculptures and wall paintings, is not just a historical study but also a love letter to a lost syncretic world of interacting and evolving religious creeds and intellectual movements, when Indian ideas transformed the world * Guardian * A multifarious and engaging narrative, which, like Indian trade, takes us in many directions, peppered with lively stories and charismatic individuals * Independent * A richly woven, highly readable account of the highlights of Indias outsized influence on the world. It is also a celebration of cosmopolitanism and cultural exchange, written with passion and verve and hinting at an optimism for Indias future of which Tagore himself would no doubt heartily have approved * Spectator * A pioneering new book based on methodical historical research to showcase the huge loss for the world in misunderstanding and misrepresenting India * i * Dalrymple is erudite and wonderfully entertaining This is a wonderful book. Read it through in delight, acquiring knowledge, perhaps even wisdom. Then you will surely return to read much of it again -- Allan Massie * Scotsman * William Dalrymples luminous new book In brilliantly excavating the Golden Road in the current age of the Silk Road, Dalrymples book is both contemporary and altogether foreign. It does not so much explain the present as indicate the long and even insurmountable distance between then and now * New Statesman * As with Dalrymples earlier books, The Golden Road is full of adventurous tales ... Woven into the text are some of his own travels, lushly described ... Dalrymple doesnt talk down to his reader, with words like fascicles, quincunx, thalassocracy, voussoirs and grimoire abounding. And the 288 pages of text are backed by a prodigious ninety-two pages of notes and a fifty-six-page bibliography * Inside Story * Dalrymples own odyssey is equally laden to the gunwales with pages of astounding illustrations and arresting anecdotes, but its destination is always clear and its argument compelling * London Review of Books * A more masterful and accessible survey of a world-changing traffic in commodities, creeds, scientific insights and artistic conventions than The Golden Road would be hard to find. The only surprise is that it has taken Dalrymple so long to address the subject. No one is better qualified to do so ... The breadth of Dalrymples research is a revelation and a delight ...What Tagore called the Greater India outside India knew no boundaries. Neither does this enthralling study * Literary Review * Dalrymple is at his artful best in his account of how the knowledge of several mathematical concepts and astronomical discoveries passed from ancient India to eighth-century Baghdad through an eccentric family of Muslim royal viziers who had once been rectors in a Buddhist monastery in Afghanistan * Observer * A wonderful storyteller, hell make you fall in love with India all over again * Indianlink * A bold, sweeping narrative ... Highly readable ... Dalyrmple's book is also timely * Australian * Anybody w

William Dalrymple is one of Britains great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and All Souls, University of Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious Presidents Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. William lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.