The year 1809 opened auspiciously for Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. It was now March, the very beginning of that brief Afghan spring, and the pulse was slowly returning to the veins of the icy landscape long ...

Historian William Dalrymple's The Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42 is a magisterial new look at the First Afghan War, in which British and East India Company troops invaded ...

American edition of "The Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42" by William Dalrymple (R), shown here at Asia Society New York in February 2012. (Suzanna Finley/Asia Society) Dalrymple ...

Nations, like people, seldom learn from their own experience, still less from the experience of others. It is a huge tribute to the tact of the distinguished British historian William Dalrymple that ...

The Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42. By William Dalrymple. Bloomsbury; 608 pages; £24.99. To be published in America in April by Knopf; $30. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk IN ...

The year is 1839, and two great empires — Great Britain and Russia — are treating the world map like a chessboard, trying to outmaneuver one another for territory. For no reason other than geography, ...

Is Hamid Karzai crazy? on the face of it, the Afghan President has said lots of odd, inflammatory and contradictory things. Over the past year, he has criticized the U.S., wondered whether its ...

Is Hamid Karzai crazy? on the face of it, the Afghan President has said lots of odd, inflammatory and contradictory things. Over the past year, he has criticized the U.S., wondered whether its ...

This is the most unusual book I have read in a long time. On a first reading, almost every page contained a comment that I strenuously disagreed with as well as an insight that completely overturned a ...