Rahul Bedi has been a journalist for 38 years, beginning his career with the Indian Express in 1979. He was posted in London in the late 1980s after attending Oxford University as a Reuters Fellow. Presently, he is New Delhi correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly, UK, the Irish Times, Dublin, and the Daily Telegraph. He was also Assistant Master at Mayo College, Ajmer and the Doon School, Dehra Dun in the 1970s.

Dinesh C. Sharma is a New Delhi-based award-winning journalist and author with over thirty-five years’ of professional experience. He has written extensively on science and technology, climate change, health, environment and innovation for national and international media, including The Lancet and Wired. He has been Science Editor at Mail Today, and Managing Editor at India Science Wire and is currently the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow (2020-2021). His book The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution was awarded the Computer History Museum Book Prize in 2016. He has also been a visiting faculty at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Ateneo de Manila University, Manila. Dinesh Sharma tweets at @dineshcsharma

Peter Church OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia) holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of New South Wales, a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Sydney and a Master’s of Law degree from the University of London. He has spent almost all his career working and living in the Asian region as an international lawyer and corporate adviser. He is the founder and chairman of AFG Venture Group (www.afgventuregroup.com), a corporate advisory firm with operations in Australia, South-East Asia and India and is Special Counsel to Blake Dawson (www. blakedawson. com), a leading Australian law firm with activities in a number of Asian jurisdictions. He was awarded the OAM in 1994 for his services towards the promotion of Australian business in South-East Asia.

For Khushwant Singh who wrote his own obituary in his twenties, death is not sacred but he reflects on it increasingly these days. In Death At My Doorstep, a collection of obituaries written over the years, he presents the dead in death, as in life – good, bad or ugly. Be it on the twilight hours of Bhutto, the gory end of Sanjay Gandhi, the overbearing Lord Mountbatten, or on his pet Alsatian Simba, each obituary bears out his irreverence or affection. Cocking a snook at death, he has also penned his own epitaph. Yet outliving those whom he admired has moved him to tears, and many of his obituaries have left the reader with a heavy heart. While Death At My Doorstep is Khushwant Singh's demystification of death, it also ferries his message to Badey Mian, in the words of Allama Iqbal: Baagh-e-bahisht say mujhay hukm-e-safar diya thha kyon? Kaar-e-Jahaan daraaz hai, ab meyra intazaar kar. (Why did you order me out of the garden of paradise? I have a lot of work that remains unfulfilled; now you better wait for me.)

First published in 1885, Bazm-i Aakhir, or The Last Gathering is a rich and lively first-hand account of life in the royal court of the last Mughal emperor in Red Fort, Bahadur Shah Zafar. From meticulous details of the day-today happenings inside the fort-palace and the royal protocols, to the celebration of festivals such as Eid, Navroz, Diwali, and even Rakshabandhan, this gives us a glimpse into the Delhi of the early nineteenth century.

Turning adversity on its head he embarked upon a career in broadcasting that began in South Africa with the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), before returning to Cardiff in September 1987 to anchor BBC Wales’ portfolio of prime time sports programs. By the mid-1990s Alan had gone freelance and, following the end of apartheid, was reunited with the SABC to cover South Africa’s return to world sport with the 1994 cricket tour to England and the 1995 Rugby World Cup. He also began what would become a long association with Singapore-based ESPN Star Sports (ESS) by commentating on the 1996 Indian cricket tour of England. By 1997 Alan had joined the ESS commentary team in India for the One Day International series between India and Sri Lanka where he was part of the commentary team, with Ravi Shastri, Sunil Gavaskar, Navjot Singh Sidhu, Harsha Bhogle and Geoffrey Boycott, otherwise known as A Few Good Men. In February 2000 he re-located to Singapore to work for ESS and for almost 16 years enjoyed broadcasting cricket, golf, rugby, tennis and a host of other sports across the Indian sub-continent. A return home to Wales in 2015 has reignited Alan’s love for rugby but as you’ll read in Easier Said Than Done, his love of sport means the shape or size of the ball is not an issue.

Richly layered and remarkably candid, this is anything but an ordinary memoir. Life-writing at its truthful and unapologetic best, here is a story of a textile historian, entrepreneur and collector with an eventful and adventurous life story. As a child in countryside England, Jenny had thought she would grow up to be a spy, but life had other plans. Brought to the world of Asian textiles, art and museums, she has over the last five decades travelled across Asia with a passion to document traditional, local, and nomadic weaves and handcrafted textiles. She lays bare her idyllic childhood in the aftermath of the Second World War; her aspirations of being in the arts and then as a researcher at the Victoria and Albert museum in London; the struggles of falling in and out of love and a broken marriage; of parenting; and her passion for Indian textiles, having established herself as one of the most successful British entrepreneurs working in India who co-founded the luxury brands shades of India and kashmir loom.