The Golden Road By William Dalrymple

With a mind-boggling mastery of sources, Dalrymple weaves a thrilling tale of India’s cultural hegemony, not forgetting its invention of mathematics and related disciplines still in use today
Spectator – Andrew Lycett

A terrific story, told with tremendous brio
The Times – Dominic Sandbrook

An outstanding new account of ancient India’s cultural conquest of the globe … The Golden Road is an absorbingly literary history, a tale of tales … Xi Jinping’s China is currently much better at promoting itself as the heart of Asia. But it may ultimately prove no match for India’s 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 it’s 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

In his masterful new work, The Golden Road (Bloomsbury, April 29), historian William Dalrymple argues that India has both the potential and the historical track record to catch up with its former peer to the northeast . . . The Golden Road fills an important gap in our understanding of the intra-Asian relations that predated the arrival of European colonisers.
Bloomberg – Kishore Mahbubani

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 India’s 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 India’s future of which Tagore himself would no doubt heartily have approved
Spectator

As always, Dalrymple writes with great knowledge and verve, and with telling details
Church Times – Richard Harries

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
Scotsman – Allan Massie

William Dalrymple’s luminous new book … In brilliantly excavating the Golden Road in the current age of the Silk Road, Dalrymple’s 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

A pioneering new book based on methodical historical research to showcase the huge loss for the world in misunderstanding and misrepresenting India
iGlobalNews

As with Dalrymple’s earlier books, The Golden Road is full of adventurous tales … Woven into the text are some of his own travels, lushly described … Dalrymple doesn’t 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

Dalrymple’s 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

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