Ali praised the books for providing a nuanced class analysis of the British in India and the Anglicized Indian upper classes who served the British during the Raj and later took control over the country after the independence and the partition. The novels The manner of narration is, especially in the first volume, looping and elliptical, shifting from 1942 to 1964 and back again, with detours back to the early 1900s. The voices shift as well as the perspective, from a third-person narrative about the doomed schoolteacher Edwina Crane to a first-person narration by another character, Lady Chatterjee, to a tour of Mayapore one evening in 1964. This shifting chronology, while never confusing, has inspired much discussion.<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=ZQvjM0C5UnkC&pg=PA63&lpg=PP1&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=html N. Hale, Chronotopicity in Paul Scott's "The Raj Quartet"]</ref>Eva Brann, Paul Scott's Raj Quintet, p.192 The four volumes are: The Jewel in the Crown (1966)The Day of the Scorpion (1968)The Towers of Silence (1971)A Division of the Spoils (1975) Some of the characters are carried through to a further novel calledStaying On (1977) Film, TV or theatrical adaptations 1984:The Jewel in the Crown'' is a television mini-series based upon parts of all four books. The selection of parts to be dramatised resulted in the series giving greater emphasis to the narrative as experienced and understood by the British characters as compared to the experiences of the Indian characters. The series was created by Granada Television for ITV and starred Susan Wooldridge, Art Malik, Om Puri, Geraldine James, Saeed Jaffrey, Karan Kapoor, Peggy Ashcroft, Judy Parfitt, Tim Pigott-Smith and Charles Dance. 2005: A 9-part BBC Radio 4 adaptation under the original title, using the book titles as subtitles. Notes Novel series Novels set in India British novels adapted into television shows