This piece is a short review in The New Criterion of The White Road: Journey into an Obsession by Edmund de Waal, which Dalrymple describes as “a literary macédoine, as it were, of the history of porcelain, autobiography, travelogue, and philosophy”. Dalrymple credits the book for opening the reader’s eyes to a fascinating artistic medium about which most people, himself included, are ignorant. Still, he says, he would have retained more of the medium’s history had the book “been set out in a less fragmented and personal way than it is here, where it is recounted like a pilgrimage to the sources of de Waal’s art”.

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