‘Dalrymple writes with a brio rare among academic historians. Here is history
almost novelistic in its vividness, wonderfully embodying both our closeness to,
and radical distance from, the past. Alone among his peers, Dalrymple is
producing the kind of work that, in scale, ambition and style, is like an oriental
version of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ Scotsman
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