Civilisational analysis as an exercise in rhetoric: Or, how to tickle the global 'elites'. Review of William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

This book, which ‘draws from a lifetime of scholarship’, as its back cover blurb reveals, immediately promises much. While not excessively long, at 300 pages, it contains another hundred pages of notes, over 50 pages of Bibliography, and twenty pages of index, making it quite impressive. Even more impressive are the thirty endorsements with which it starts, and their sources, which include practically all the main newspapers in the UK, from the Guardian and the Independent through the Financial Times and the Spectator to the London Review of Books, the Times (not forgetting the Irish Times, the Hindustan Times, and the Church Times), and the TLS. Of these, selected passages, or even single words, embellish the front and back covers. Taken together, the booming words ‘outstanding’, ‘compelling’, ‘dazzling’, ‘terrific’, ‘tremendous’, ‘mindboggling’, ‘thrilling’, ‘engaging’, and ‘lively’ are, frankly, too much, but in our days, overstatement has become the norm.