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 ...

Shah Shuja did much the same to the British toward the end of his rule. When I published Return of a King in India in January, Karzai read my book within a fortnight of publication and invited me ...

Shah Shuja, conniving with Ranjit Singh’s enemies in the Punjab hills, attacked Kashmir and seized it. He sent for Rs150,000 owed by Lahore’s money-changers, ...

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 ...

Shah Shuja was assassinated in 1842 in Afghanistan. Ranjit Singh died in 1839. During the next 10 years there were intrigues, palace coups and political assassinations among his successors.