This is a depressing book. I read it expecting tales of deep traditional faith in remote places. I found stories of lone decrepit survivors waiting to die and then end the two-thousand-year history of Christianity in their region. Dalrymple seems to view them as historical relics, a strange tr...
William Dalrymple sets out with his backpack, pen and paper and a copy of the book 'The Spiritual Meadow' to travel to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt over six months in 1994, to take a look at the Christian communities that live there and to see what has become of them and their heritag...
In keeping with my recent resolve to read the first book of my favourite authors, I finished In Xanadu this weekend. Unlike my usual method of finishing books in long stretches, usually over a weekend, this one took much longer but the interruptions did not bother me. In a strange way, the breaks...
This is a scholarly work of Indian history, extensively researched and written with a passion and a nostalgia for a not so distant past when there was wholesale interracial sexual exploration and substantial cultural assimilation between Indians and the British in India. Author Dalrymple says tha...
I must say I had to reset my expectations while reading this book. I started reading what I thought would be an unprejudiced holistic third-person view of India, unaffected by patriotic sentiments, yet aided by a depth of understanding of the subcontinent and its culture. For William Dalrymple is...