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.