A historian’s first novel is a romance set in 1857

Discovering the French emperor through forgotten histories even as Ridley Scott asks historians to ‘get a life’

Queens of resistance

The rootlessness of family can give you the world

The sartorial expressions of the Queen’s soft power

The many incarnations of Tipu Sultan

The perils of a binary reading of sources at odds with a complicated reality

The Indus Civilisation can teach us much about equality and harmony, aesthetics and planning

There is no single, pure Indian way of cooking and eating

The French connection behind the painting that shows Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan defeating Company forces at the Battle of Pollilur