Roshen Dalal’s Dictionary is an affordable, well-produced and handy reference-work that is bound to go down well with scholars and general readers alike though judging by the author’s prefatory remarks, it primarily seeks to address the latter.
Carlo Ginzburg, the Italian historian, notes sarcastically in his fasci nating book The Judge and the Historian: ‘For many historians, the notion of proof is out of fashion: like that of truth, to which it is bound with a very solid historical (and therefore unnecessary) link.
Recently, I was told of the experience of the Managing Trustee of Navjivan Prakashan which holds the copyright to the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. In connection with a copyright case, the trustee had to present himself at the Tamil Nadu High Court along with the originals of some correspondence that Gandhi had with one of his associates in South Africa.
Once you have lived with mountains, Under the benedictory pines And deodars, near stars And a brighter moon, With wood smoke and mist, Sweet smell of grass, dew lines On spider-spun, sun-kissed Buttercup and vine;
Having been a tree-spotter for over a dozen years, this reviewer was growing increasingly frustrated as every new book on trees-and a fair number of glossies have been published on the subject in the last five or six years-did nothing better than re¬chronicle the semals,
Those of us who grew up in the sixties and seventies, nurtured on Bangla literature, regarded Byomkesh Bakshi as our very own Sherlock Holmes and a very convincing and effective one at that. From the same standpoint Ajit, his assistant, emerges as an equally Dr Watson.