City of Djinns

Description

‘As the author of the best travel book of recent years at the intensely irritating age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple has now shown that In Xanadu was no fluke. City of Djinns is an entertaining mix of history and diary informed by a deep curiosity about the ways in which the ghosts of even the most distant past still walk in the twentieth century – Christopher Lockwood, Daily Telegraph

‘Dalrymple has pulled it off again… At a time when the book of travels is beginning to lose its fashionable allure, City of Djinns is not really a travel book at all. It is a kind of memoir recording the response of a single, gentle, merry and learned mind to the presence of an ancient city…Dalrymple is anything but a voyeur. Even his excursions into the world of the eunuchs are conducted with a kind of grave innocence. He is more a pilgrim than an observer, always trying to understand … It is the work of a man who has consciously chosen to commit himself to the profession of letters, and in it we see the first fine rapture of In Xanadu deepening to a profounder dedication … hours and hours of pleasure for his readers’ – Jan Morris, Independent

‘On one level there are the amusing rites of passage, the struggles with bureaucracy, the eccentricity of Dalrymple’s landlord, all entertainingly related. Dalrymple has a way of letting you smell and feel the city. There are beautifully chiselled descriptions of a grand capital…but much of the book’s strength lies in Dalrymple’s skill in peeling the historical onion and showing how (the) New Delhi resonates with the old … A splendid tapestry -Trevor Fishlock, Sunday Telegraph