On New Year's Day, 1931, Jawaharlal Nehru began a remarkable series of letters on the history of the world to his daughter, Indira, then thirteen years old. Over the next thirty months, Nehru wrote nearly two hundred letters in this series, which were later published as Glimpses of World History.

With its panoramic sweep and its gripping narrative flow, all the more remarkable for being written in prison where Nehru had no recourse to reference books or a library, Glimpses of World History covers the rise and fall of empires and civilizations from Greece and Rome to China and West Asia; great figures such as Ashoka and Genghis Khan, Gandhi and Lenin; wars and revolutions, democracies and dictatorships. An enduring classic, this book is dazzling testimony to the breadth of Nehru's world view, his grasp of the lessons of history, and of the forces and personalities that shape it.