A real love letter to the author's adopted home. Very interesting combination of travelogue/history. Dalrymple's enjoyable introduction to India, complete with hardnosed Punjabi landlady and India's impenetrable bureaucracy, slowly expands outwards and opens doors to Delhi's recent and distant past. 

He visits a variety of people and lets them tell their own stories: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs; taxi drivers, academics, mystics. He treats Delhi almost like an archaeological dig - layer upon layer of history and culture much of it buried and mostly forgotten but always leaving traces. 

I was particularly fond of the book's conclusion. It neatly brought together various strands to illustrate his core belief - that no where on Earth is quite like India with its unbroken chain of culture spanning thousands of years.

Wow I have fallen in love with history. This book is so good. I have learnt so much.   Dalrymple tells you funny stories of Delhi-wallahs and then suddenly deep-dives into the history of Delhi. It's all so well written. 

As they say 'beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder', Dalrymple seems to be in love with Delhi, with its rich past that so much so he gets a glimpse of it in nooks and corners and ruins of the city. What may feel like a description of some rumble, Dalrymple slowly and gracefully discloses the its grandeur.

The stories of the Sultanate and the Mughals are definitely hilarious and at the same time quite informative.
 
Even his daily interactions with his landlady Mrs Puri or the cab driver Mr Balvinder Singh or Dr Jaffery are so lively. 
The last part of the book Dalrymple save it for the ultimate history of Delhi, or maybe fiction or maybe both - the Mahabharata. His discussions with Dr BB Lal are for sure very intriguing.

 " Indraprastha had fallen; six hundred years of Muslim domination had come
and gone; a brief interruption by the British was almost forgotten. But Shiva, the oldest living God in the world, was still worshipped; Sanskrit - a language which predates any other living tongue by millennia - was still read, still spoken. Moreover, the sadhus and rishis — familiar figures from the Mahabharata remained today, still following the rigorous laws of India’s most ancient vocation: giving up everything to wander the face of the earth in search of enlightenment; renouncing the profane in the hope of a brief glimpse of the sacred. In these wet and dishevelled figures sitting cross-legged under the neem and banyan trees of the river bank lay what must certainly be the most remarkable Delhi survival of all."

In all a wonderful book everyone must read!

While I would still like to read a book about Delhi by a native, this is a really winning combination travelogue/history. Dalrymple begins with some low-hanging fruit in depicting his unreasonable landlady and India's impenetrable bureaucracy -- landlords and bureaucracy being two of the worst things in any culture -- but from there he clearly sets out to speak to a variety of people and let them tell their own stories: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs; taxi drivers, academics, mystics. He also (mostly) vividly relays 800 or so years of history, with a particular interest toward architecture and legend/storytelling. By the end, even his landlady gets a redemptive moment.