The Company Quartet
William Dalrymple in conversation with Shashi Tharoor

William Dalrymple’s multi-award-winning histories, The Anarchy, White Mughals, Return of a King and The Last Mughal, comprise the essential collection, The Company Quartet. A culmination of two decades of meticulous research and masterful narration, The Company Quartet tells a comprehensive story of British Imperialism and the conquest of India. How did a dangerously unregulated private company come to be the first global corporate power? In conversation with bestselling writer and politician, Shashi Tharoor, Dalrymple unravels two hundred years of colonial history, covert political machinations and bloody resistance - the rise and fall of the East India Company.

William Dalrymple - is the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapucinski Prize-winning Return of a King. His most recent book, The Anarchy, was short listed for the Duke of Wellington medal, the Tata Book of the Year and the Historical Writers Association Award, was a Finalist for the Cundill Prize for History and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations. Dalrymple has been awarded five honorary doctorates, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting lectureships at Princeton, Brown and Oxford, where he is currently an Honourary Bodleian fellow. In 2018, he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy and was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect. He is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Shashi Tharoor - a third-term Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, is the bestselling author of twenty-three books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a former Under Secretary- General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and for External Affairs in the Government of India. He has won numerous awards, including the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019, Dr. Tharoor was also awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in the category of ‘English Non- Fiction’ for his book An Era of Darkness. He chairs the Indian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Information Technology.