Books: Dalrymple’s quartet in paperback

From bestselling historian William Dalrymple comes a four-book collection chronicling the thrilling rise and fall of the East India Company.

We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a much more sinister reality. For it was not the British government that began seizing chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in the city of London.

Bringing together two decades of meticulous research and masterful narration, 'The Company Quartet' (Bloomsbury) tells the remarkable story of how the magnificent Mughal empire, which then generated just under half the world's wealth, disintegrated and came to be replaced by the first global corporate power: the East India Company.

William Dalrymple's epic, bestselling and multi-award-winning histories are now available in this magnificent paperback box set, presented in a stylish slipcase. Comprised of four individual books - "The Anarchy", "White Mughals", "Return of a King" and "The Last Mughal" - this essential collection spans over two hundred years of tumultuous colonial history, covert political machinations and bloody resistance.

***

Policy and political economy --Grim, funny and insightful

Irreverent and hilarious, wise and introspective, Kaushik Basus "Policy Maker’s Journal" (Simon & Schuster) records the course of his career over seven years, first in India as the Chief Economic Adviser and after that as the Chief Economist at the World Bank in Washington.

Encounters with expected and unexpected world leaders and influencers, Manmohan Singh, Narendra Modi, Barack Obama, Sheikh Hasina, Deepika Padukone and many, many others pepper and liven this charming page-turner of a journal. The World Bank years ranged from interacting with officials in tiny, remote countries like Samoa, to gigantic nations with considerable heft, such as China.

"Kaushik Basu's irreverent diary of his days as a policymaker manages to be interesting, funny, and insightful, all at the same time. If you have ever wondered what it is like advising leaders in India or being a high official in a multilateral organization, this is the book to read," says former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan.

"Blurbs for memoirs are rightly untrusted. Not in this case! Kaushik Basu and I have met only briefly. So, you can take it from me: Basu's diary is a masterpiece of wit and insight of the Indian political scene, of bureaucratic comedy, and of economic and social conditions all over the world. It's a brave economist, who dares to reveal such a talent for prose," says economist James K. Galbraith, whose father, John Kenneth Galbraith, served as US Ambassador to India 1961-63.