The Times - UK (2022-01-01)

8 saturday review Saturday January 1 2022 | the times

Leisurely Ride, now in the V&A, is

my favourite of all his works. Nainsukh

brings together all the precision and

detail of the Mughal tradition, the

bright colours of Rajasthani painting,

the elegance of Pahari art, and to all

this he adds a refinement, a humanism

and an observational eye that is

entirely his own.

He breaks free from the formality of

so much Indian court art and creates

a living, breathing world full of real

individuals. In A Leisurely Ride we can

almost hear the singer, Saddu with his

lute, can admire the vulnerability and

beauty of the lovely dancing girl Amal

as she rides out swathed in her winter

shawl, turning back to catch the eye of

her patron Mian Mukund Dev, and

glimpse the growing relationship

between the two of them. This is Indian

courtly life at its most elegant and

perfect: music, the faint bubble of water

pipe, the chill of a winter sunset, a mist

of yellow winter mustard, hunting dogs

out on the hills looking for partridges

and a blossoming love affair with its

consummation soon to come.

The music that cheers me up

When I feel lost or anxious I find that

the great baroque Requiem of Tomas

Luis de Victoria brings me back on track

and instantly calms me down and

grounds me.

My favourite films

The Seventh Seal by Ingmar

Bergman, Picnic at Hanging

Rock by Peter Weir, The Constant

Gardener by Fernando Meirelles

and Monsoon Wedding by

Mira Nair.

The last film that made

me laugh

Just watched Trainspotting again

after a decade and it’s just as

brilliant as at first.

My guiltiest cultural

pleasure

Bob Mortimer on Would

I Lie to You? never fails

to crack me up.

Wildernesses of handsome Groves.” It

sounded magical, but I’ve quickly given

up every time I’ve attempted to read it

through.

The books I wish I had written

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor,

The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier

or The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane.

The book I couldn’t finish

Ulysses by James Joyce.

My favourite TV

series

The German Weimar

drama Babylon Berlin

— fabulous stuff.

My favourite piece

of music

Night, Silence, Desert by

Kayhan Kalhor and

MR Shajarian.

If I could own one painting it

would be...

The 18th-century artist Nainsukh is

my favourite Indian painter, and A

My favourite author and book

The Fall of Constantinople 1453 by Steven
Runciman. The author was the greatest
medievalist of his day and the historian
whose gifts I most envy. His writing was
based on extensive reading of primary
sources in a dazzling variety of
languages, but at the end of years of
study he wrote wide-ranging books
about big subjects and did so in
beautifully honed prose for a general
audience — something that is still rare,
but which in the 1950s seemed a radical
departure from the academic norm.
“When Gibbon or Macaulay were
writing,” Runciman said, “the publication
of one of their volumes was a great
literary event. One of the tragedies of
our time is that it is no longer considered
relevant to write history well.”
In the preface of his great masterpiece,
A History of the Crusades, Runciman
threw down the gauntlet to his rivals:
“Faced by the mountainous heap of
minutiae of knowledge and awed by the
watchful severity of his colleagues,” he
wrote, “the modern historian too often
takes refuge in narrowly specialised
dissertations, small fortresses that are
easy to defend from attack ... I believe
that the supreme duty of the historian is
to write history, to attempt to record in
one sweeping sequence the greater
events and movements that have swayed
the destinies of man.”

The book I’ve just read

The Amur River: Between Russia and
China by Colin Thubron. On Thubron’s
trip to the Amur River, his horse rolled
and threw him in a Mongolian bog,
leaving him with two fractured ribs and
a broken fibula. Many much younger
writers would have given up and called
in a helicopter. Yet with the grit of an
explorer from an earlier age, Thubron
doggedly carried on, riding, limping and
boating 3,000 miles along the Amur,
past the watchtowers of the Russian and
Chinese border, surviving military
manoeuvres, arrests and police
interrogations as he moved slowly
through Mongolia, Siberia and
Manchuria to the Amur’s Pacific mouth.
The book he produced at the end of this
ordeal is no less remarkable than the
journey, a miraculous late-style
masterpiece, the equal of
any of his earlier works,
that will cement his
reputation as one of
our greatest prose
writers in any genre.

The book I’m
ashamed
I haven’t read

The Garden of Cyrus by
Thomas Browne. An
extraordinary passage was
read at the funeral of Patrick
Leigh Fermor: “But the Quincunx of
Heaven runs low, and ’tis time to close
the five ports of knowledge. We are
unwilling to spin out our awaking
thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep,
which often continueth praecogitations;
making Cables of Cobwebbes and

my culture fix

The historian lets us into his cultural life

William

Dalrymple

courtly love

A Leisurely Ride by

the 18th-century artist

Nainsukh. Left:

Vasundhara Das in

Monsoon Wedding.

Below left: Patrick

Leigh Fermor. Below:

Prince in 1985

VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON

My favourite play

The Peter Brook/Jean-Claude

Carrière Mahabharata.

The place I feel happiest

The great lonely medieval fortress of

Mandu, high on its plateau in central

India. Also Seacliff beach near North

Berwick in Scotland, where I grew up.

The poem that saved me

Night on the Island by Pablo Neruda.

The instrument I played

The French horn and trumpet.

The instrument I wish I’d learnt

The guitar, the lute or the oud.

The exhibition that I’m looking

forward to

Amazônia presented by Sebastião

Salgado at the Science Museum.

I’m having a fantasy dinner

party. I’ll invite these artists

and authors...

Salvador Dalí, the Mughal empress Nur

Jahan, Luis Buñuel, Caravaggio, Lee

Miller, Diane Keaton, Truman Capote,

Penélope Cruz, F Scott Fitzgerald, the

Italian baroque painter Artemisia

Gentileschi, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf,

Martha Gelhorn and the poet Ghalib

might make for a jolly combination.

And I’ll put on this music...

I think we might bring back JJ Cale to

serenade them at dinner and Prince to

get the dancing going afterwards.

Underrated

Bruce Chatwin, once hugely acclaimed,

has now seen the pendulum of

fashion swung firmly against him.

He lies largely forgotten or, if

remembered, thought of as a lying,

gilded mythomane. Yet Chatwin

had three matchless gifts. He was

a thinker of genuine originality;

a reader of great erudition; and a

writer of breathtakingly bleak and

chiselled prose with a remarkable

ability to evoke place, to bring to life

a whole world in a single unexpected

image, to pull a perfect sentence

out the air with the ease of a child

netting a butterfly. His first book,

In Patagonia, is a metaphysical

exploration of “the uttermost part

of the Earth”, and probably the

most influential travel book written

since the war.

My favourite podcast

I’m addicted to The Rest Is History,

the utterly brilliant podcast in which

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook

take the mickey out of each other

and most of the great figures of

world history. It’s very clever and

very funny. The recent episode about

Alexander the Great was a proper

tour de force — moving, thought-

provoking and had me weeping

with laughter as I drove up the M40.

William Dalrymple’s

Company Quartet is

published as a box set

by Bloomsbury

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