A page-turning history of how a nation was defined by the people it welcomed or persecuted. Tudor and Stuart England through the eyes of incomers and exiles – and beautifully written

PHILIPPA GREGORY, author of Normal Women

A wonderful gallery of precisely drawn yet constantly surprising Tudor and Stuart portraits, like an album of perfect Hilliard miniatures that dazzle us with their cosmopolitan attitudes and globalised lives. Taking us from English Jesuits in Goa to Italian renaissance scholars in Oxford via an English eunuch in Ottoman Constantinople and a Kentish Samurai in seventeenth-century Edo, this is a perspective-altering take on a world we usually think of in far more domestic and provincial terms. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, Nandini Das has written another ground-breaking masterwork

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE, author of The Golden Road and The Anarchy

A beautifully constructed and thought-provoking book that provides a fresh, vibrant perspective on the Tudor and Stuart age. As well as telling the wider story of immigration and exploration, of the forging of national identity, it brings to light an exquisitely drawn cast of characters – artists, merchants, musicians and more – whose lives intersected with the 'scepter'd isle' of Shakespeare

TRACY BORMAN, author of The Stolen Crown

Das's history feels as it thinks. Her book separates itself from histories of the period by seeing into the past as a prism for us to understand our present and thereby shape our future

FRED D'AGUIAR, author of The Longest Memory

In this revelatory book, Nandini Das opens up a glimmering vision of a Tudor and Stuart England we hardly know, yet which immediately feels essential

ALEX VON TUNZELMANN, author of Fallen Idols

A stunning and evocative book. It will make you see Tudor and Stuart England as never before, and question long-held ideas of statehood, identity and belonging. This is how history should be written

KAVITA PURI, author of Partition Voices