India has inspired William Dalrymple for well-on thirty years, resulting in a number of eminently readable books, including White Mughals—an analysis of east-west inter-cultural conflicts), Return of a King (a portrait of military disaster); and The Anarchy, an exposé of colonial exploitation. In his latest book, The Golden Road, Dalrymple for the first time tackles a big, civilizational theme: what world history owes to the subcontinent.

Vita Sackville-West’s novel The Edwardians describes a famous explorer forced to perform as “the lion of the hour” in the drawing room of a great country estate. For this earnest scientist and adventurer, it’s a painful humiliation for him to don white tie and attempt polite conversation with idle aristocrats who have no clue where he has been or what he has achieved. Arminius Vambéry, who in the course of his life wore many different costumes, put on many masks and cycled through the world’s religions, enjoyed nothing better than regaling a society drawing room with his tales of the exotic orient. He made a career out of being “lion of the hour”. Anabel Loyd’s new biography of Vambéry painstakingly and thoughtfully explores how Vambéry pulled this off. 

Pity the poor archaeologists who lie on their bellies in sand or mud and painstakingly dust off bits of fossilized wood or bone, ceramics or metal scraps. It is, however, from their patient work that scientific truth progresses. Our understanding of the natural history of the horse has galloped ahead in the 21st century. As late as 1996, a scholarly book on Arabian horses could claim Saudi Arabia as the birthplace of this animal. 

No animal has had as profound an impact on human history as the horse. The journey begins in prehistory, with a small, shy animal that humans hunted for food. Hunters domesticated the horse in order to ensure a supply of meat and, later, mare’s milk, which is more nutritious than cow’s milk. This was a watershed event for both species, transforming the horse from an animal fleeing at a gallop from the mere smell of humans into the most valuable of their livestock. The horse’s need to roam far and wide for pasture prompted the horse herders to spread out across the Eurasian steppe. Then herders learned to ride horses in order to keep up with their far-flung herds; this changed the course of history.

How did a small island nation off the coast of Europe come to play such an oversized role in the making of modern China? That question must have occurred to both Prime Minister David Cameron and Chairman Xi Jin Ping, perhaps with a touch of irony, when they reviewed the honor guard in London in 2015, under a canopy of Union Jacks and red banners. Kerry Brown, who has written numerous books about both Chinese history and its current leadership, provides his answer through an engaging and wide ranging retelling of the two countries’ entwinement. 

“Historians are stuck with the evidence, novelists can describe what actually happened,” says the French writer, Jean-Félix de la Ville Beaugé. In Firestorm in Paradise, historian Rana Safvi switches roles from the constraints of the former to the imagination of the latter. In her history of Mughal Delhi, Shahjahanabad, published in 2019, she meticulously retraces the topography of the city, uncovering remains of their long-forgotten kiosks and gardens. Now as a novelist, she populates those stone remnants with people, smells, songs and sights, bringing back life as it must have been to Old Delhi.

We know a lot about Isfahan in the 17th century. Poets and court chroniclers praised its beauty and recorded its expansion under the great monarch, Shah Abbas (1588-1629). European travelers like John Chardin and Pietro della Valle left us picturesque descriptions of its monuments and people. Artists painstakingly recorded the city-scape. Scholars have long studied its architecture and urbanism. In recent years, Kathryn Babayan has delved into the letters and diaries of its citizens. Now Farshid Emami tries to pull all these threads together and answer the question: what was it like to live in Shah Abbas’s Isfahan?