I must, of course, begin by congratulating The Book Review on her 40th birthday. For survival and growth with integrity, and for what it is doing to encourage discussion and debate, without which, as Romila Thapar and TBR have recently reminded us, we cannot have democracy. There are increasing signs that this is indeed the case. I was scared when I gave a talk on socalled Love Jihad recently. After Professor Kalburgi’s assassination, my mother called me to say I should install a spy-hole in my door, if I didn’t have one. Do not open the door to strangers, she said.


Reviewed by: Mohan Rao

In T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Merlyn asks his owl Archimedes, ‘What is your favourite bird?’ ‘Archimedes thought this over for some time, and then said, “Well, it is a large question. It is rather like asking you what is your favourite book.”’I’ve been reading for six-and-a-half decades. Learnt reading at mum’s knee through a wonderful Lucy Mabel Atwell book. Obviously one cannot talk about all the books one has read.


Reviewed by: Shobhana Bhattacharji
Helen Macdonald

Wandering idly through my mind’s library, pausing at books that I had read long ago, at those I remembered vividly and others that had receded from immediate recall, I realized that somehow, I had always been drawn to non-fiction. Essays, letters and diaries, memoirs, travel writing of the interior-monologue-George Schaller variety, biographies.


Reviewed by: Ritu Menon
Yashwant Chittal

In the last forty years Bangalore has exploded from a sleepy ‘air-conditioned garden city’ into one of the most chaotic megalopolises of India, its economy dominated by business corporates like Infosys, Wipro and Biocon, and a host of others which have come up in their shadow. There was a time when it was a city whose hotels filled up only during the horse racing season and emptied immediately thereafter, whose finances were controlled by two distillaries, and whose intellectual reputation was sustained by half a dozen research establishments protected from the hurly-burly of the outside world by hefty government funding and sprawling green lawns.


Reviewed by: Girish Karnad
Peter Hopkirk

It is now twenty-five years since Peter Hopkirk’s book was published, the great game between Imperial Russia and Great Britain in Central Asia that he celebrated is forgotten, as dated as marbles in an age of video games, but it remains worth reading, not just because it is beautifully written, but because it still raises questions, sets off trains of thought, and goads the reader to explore the issues he writes about. Few books do this, and those that do age well.


Reviewed by: Satyabrata Pal
Pranab Bardhan

The title of this short essay invokes the title of a landmark volume, published in 1985, Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol. It expresses the theme that unites a clutch of books, all of which were published in the mid-1980s and had an enduring impact on scholarship in a field of Indian politics. In different ways, these accounts of the political economy of development and redistribution underscored the centrality of the state.


Reviewed by: Nirja Gopal Jayal