Writing a book puts pressure on the most patient of families, and I have been especially lucky with mine: not only did they all uproot themselves from homes and schools in London and move to Delhi while I researched this book, Sam and Adam also put up with the loss of bedtime stories while I was writing; and my gentle, beautiful and sweet-natured Olivia has been almost superhumanly sensitive and forbearing with her husband as he locked himself away from family life for six months and immersed himself instead in the inner courtyards of the last Mughal King..

A bamboo fence surrounds the grave for some considerable distance, and by the time the fence is worn out, the grass will again have properly covered the spot, and no vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.

The State Prisoner Davies referred to was more properly known as Bahadur Shah II, known from his pen-name as Zafar, meaning 'Victory'. Zafar was the last Mughal Emperor, and the direct descendant of Genghis Khan and Timur, of Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. He was born in 1775, when the British were still a relatively modest and mainly coastal power in India, looking inwards from three enclaves on the Indian shore. In his lifetime he had seen his own dynasty reduced to humiliating insignificance, while the British transformed themselves from vulnerable traders into an aggressively expansionist military force.