Baburnama
Quotes and highlights from Baburnama by Zahiru'din Muhammad Babur Padshah Ghazi and Annette Susannah Beveridge — 1 passage I marked up while reading (August 2024). Everything below is taken straight from my Kindle, unedited and in the order I read it.
What this book keeps circling back todistinction, rare and book.
All 1 highlight
Losses from the text of Bābur’s book are the more disastrous because it truly embodies his career. For it has the rare distinction of being contemporary with the events it describes, is boyish in his boyhood, grows with his growth, matures as he matured. Undulled by retrospect, it is a fresh and spontaneous recital of things just seen, heard or done. It has the further rare distinction of shewing a boy who, setting a future task before him—in his case the revival of Timurid power—began to chronicle his adventure in the book which through some 37 years was his twinned comrade, which by its special distinctions has attracted readers for nearly a half-millennium, still attracts and still is a thing apart from autobiographies which look back to recal dead years.
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I write about what I read — medicine, technology, and what holds up across centuries — in Side Effects. The essays live in the archive, and the rest of the shelf is on Book Notes.