‘In Xanadu records the impressions, prejudices and enthusiasms of a very young, naive and deeply Anglocentric undergraduate,’ William Dalrymple confesses in the Folio Society’s 25-year anniversary edition of his 1989 debut. Xanadu retraces Marco Polo’s journey from Jerusalem to China. The author, an Ampleforth and Cambridge educated 21-year-old, pretends he is Robert Byron. In 2015, books like this needed apologetic preambles. Dalrymple couldn’t let anyone think he sympathised with this younger, lesser man.
Most popular
Madeline Grant
Keir Starmer can’t keep deluding himself about two-tier policing
No, modern Willie is an enlightened guy. Yesterday, he was in a London Bridge theatre addressing a conference of the Britain Palestine Project. He is its new patron. Dalrymple is a latecomer to the Palestinian cause, but is now going for it with fervour. He teased the audience with a bit of his new book, a history of Palestine, said not teaching about the Nakba in schools is ‘the most culpable act of historical amnesia in modern British public life’, and told attendees that ‘Britain’s moral responsibility for the plight of Palestine… is considerably greater than its moral responsibility for Ukraine.’
