The bullet that gets you is said to have your name on it, so William Dalrymple is lucky that on one hot day in Kabul there must have been a typo. The author was in a car on the way to the airport when a sniper aimed at the back of his head and fired: the bullet crashed into the vehicle’s reinforced glass. To this day Dalrymple has a photo on his mobile phone: a reminder of what writing The Company Quartet almost cost him. Yet for such risks there is now reward. The labours of 20 years, tens of thousands of miles travelled, hundreds of miles of archive shelves searched, is now available in one handsome slip case containing the four books: The Anarchy,

Source: The Times January 09, 2022 06:52 UTC