This is without doubt an enormously enjoyable, witty and informative book. It is also curiously dated - William Dalrymple reads here more like a young Evelyn Waugh, or possibly Graham Greene in Travels With My Aunt, than a 19 year old at the end of the 20th century. However, each to his own: personally I still enjoyed the account, despite occasionally feeling a slight desire to shake some of the pompous Empire-builder out of him (his later books have lost some of this tendency, apart from the 'amusing native' sketches which I found rather overdone in City of Djinns). One of the features of In Xanadu that I found most endearing was the fact that Dalrymple seemed, for much of the trip, to be having a thoroughly nasty time, and wasn't afraid to lose face by telling us so ('Latakia is a hole.') - as my experience is that much travel consists of being smelly, tired and miserable it was reassuring to find that someone else shared this viewpoint too. However, Dalrymple's overwhelming talent is definitely to convey a vivid sense of the places he's been, and In Xanadu displays that in spades. Really astonishly good for a first book.
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