"I am writing definitely primarily for an audience who don’t know India."

“It is true that the early Nehruvian textbooks were written by Romila Thapar and so on, many of whom were Marxists and it is true that those textbooks did sort of emphasize a slightly rose-tinted vision of Hindu-Muslim unity ... which left room for the right to say this isn't history. ... I'd say that the Nehruvian history books written in the 1950s were sufficiently rose-tinted to leave room for complaint.”

“Dalrymple is British—Scottish, to be exact—but his controversial statements are more likely to concern the country's Mughal or British past. He is today India's most famous narrative historian.”

“His fluent and moving presentations of big subjects—India's first war of independence in "The Last Mughal ", for example — sometimes irritate native historians who feel they have been scooped by a powerful foreign interest, but this is a little unfair:..Dalrymple's success has shown that there is a market for well-written history in India. This is itself an achievement.”

“In the past twenty years, he has rigorously pursued fascination for , writing one brilliant travel book , two vivid histories , and one anthology of acute acute journalism about South Asia. He came to India before it had achieved its status as a frontier boomland for computer programmers and writers alike, and he has lived there, on and off, since 1989... he has become something of a godfather to a generation of writers who are producing nonfiction about the country. The fact that Dalrymple looks like a sunnier version of the actor James Gandolfini and loves to party no doubt helps with this reputation.”

“He is one of Britain’s most successful travel writers, whose highly entertaining books elegantly combine scholarship and story-telling, trans-cultural investigations and romance.”

“And who was this speaker, anyway? I waited to the end, enduring the nonsense of it all just to find out. It turned out to be William Dalrymple. Ah, of course. William Dalrymple, described here long ago, quite accurately, as an up-market Barbara Cartland, whose tales of trans-racial passion at the Mughal Court, or at this or that princely court in the time of the Mughals, has it all: star-crossed lovers, and of course the Splendor That Was India, or rather the India of the Muslim rulers who lived off of their Hindu subjects, the subjects who were killed by the Muslims in numbers without any historical parallel. . Now a love of luxe, and of luxe combined with heaving breasts, is the kind of thing that the Barbara-Cartlands of this world love, including even the plausible sort who put in a bit more history and a little less of the Romance-novelette lord or duke or Arab prince , who picks up the girl in her swoon at the very end — that is, William Dalrymple. He’s as vulgar and stupid as they come, behind the plummy voice and the pretense of being a historian.”