Viking (Penguin), 2006. Good second-hand.

Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, a talented poet, and a skilled calligrapher. But while his ancestors had controlled most of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the aged Zafar was king to name only. Deprived of real political power by the East India Company, he nevertheless succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance and presided over one of the greatest cultural renaissances in Indian history. Then in 1857 Zafar's flourishing capital became the centre of an uprising that reduced his beloved Delhi to a battered, empty ruin. When Zafar have his blessing to a rebellion among the Company's own Indian troops, it transformed an army mutiny into the largest uprising the British Empire ever had to face. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to t he death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat.