Blood and bling

There must be any number of self-respecting gemmologists out there on first-name terms with other diamonds, but for most of us the Koh-i-Noor is pretty well it. Most of what we think we know might be myth, guesswork or just plain wrong, and yet in spite of — or perhaps because of — that, the diamond which once adorned the Mughal empire’s Peacock Throne still retains all its old, ambiguous allure.

If Anita Anand can trace her own fascination back to a childhood visit with her father to see the stone in the Tower of London, it is rather harder to see just what — other than ‘an ingenious agent’ — might have persuaded William Dalrymple to turn a ‘momentary jeu d’esprit’ into a full-blown book. He is obviously utterly at home with the cultural and historical background to the story, but that doesn’t get round the tricky fact that for the first million years of its history and 60 pages of the book there is absolutely nothing that can be said with any confidence about the Koh-i-Noor.

Andrew O’Hagan talks about his new book The Secret Life – a funny, alarming and disturbing picture of what happens when digital fantasy meets analogue reality. Plus, he reveals the truth about Julian Assange’s appalling table-manners:

While he makes the best of what he has — ancient sacred texts, mighty battles between the ‘invincible bear king’ and ‘beautiful man-god’ Krishna, bejewelled and bare-breasted Indian queens, breathless poets, dazzled visitors, early treatises and pearls, gold, diamonds, spinels and rubies by the shovel-load — it is, as he concedes, a frustrating business. Throughout the early Mughal reigns there are references to stones that may or may not be the Koh-i-Noor, but it is not until 1739, after the sack of Mughal Delhi and the slaughter of 39,000 of its inhabitants, that the ‘Mountain of Light’, gleaming atop the captured Peacock Throne, belatedly emerges into history as part of the vast war booty of the conquering Nader Shah.