JOHN DREW

Dr Shahina Ghazanfar, the author of a series of books on the flora of the Middle East who compiled this compendium, explains: “This is not a religious book but about history and culture. It promotes the pleasure of research and learning, I hope as much for my readers as for myself”. 

Szilvia Reif, a student of mine from the (indicatively named) Gandhi School in Pècs, Hungary, wrote a poem that tells what it feels like to be a ‘Gypsy (properly Roma).

Are ghosts real? This was the question Mollie, a little 8-year-old girl who lives at the end of our street asked me in a–real–letter she wrote me recently. I had apparently included a book of ghost stories in a bag of books I had given her.

The year is 1721. There are Indians, many no doubt Bengali, visible on the streets of London, some settled down there, others at a loss, mostly sea-farers off the East India Company ships bringing the Indian fabrics that have become all the fashion, silks worn by the rich, cottons by the poor.

Where do you stand on this matter of pulling down statues, a hot topic during the ongoing Black and Indigenous Lives Matter campaigns? Do you favour putting up statues at all? Who, if anyone, would you put one up to?

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, as much at home on the Kali Ghat as in Greenwich Village, is best remembered in Bangladesh on account of his poem, September on the Jessore Road. Year One.

Many centuries ago, Chinese pilgrims came up the Bay of Bengal on their way to Buddhist sites in the Subcontinent. We have no record of their conversations with the people of Bengal but it was the accurate accounts of early Chinese travellers that enabled archaeologists in the 19th century to rediscover the lost Buddhist sites like that inside a hill at Paharpur.

No need to wonder what you are: Bengal’s brightest, closest star in the night sky - though on the Earth none noticed your auspicious birth.

Splashes of blue in the springtime green,

[for Samuel on his 15th birthday]

Furniture dies. Empty now,

Here we are on the Irish border for Hallowe’en, originally a Celtic festival designed to propitiate the ghosts of the dead.

By the time James Rennell in the 1770’s, working out of Dhaka, finished surveying all the many rivers of Bengal, most of them had changed course, thus showing as much indifference to cartography as to any other form of human presumption.

Did Shakespeare know he was “Shakespeare”? That is, even in his own day, did he know he was a cut above the ordinary when it came to writing dramatic poetry, that his language was, as a miner’s son would later put it, “so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar”?

On March 18th, a poet named John was hit in the eye and knocked out by a ball while playing an informal game of cricket. Perhaps

It is a wonderful irony that T.S. Eliot, the publication of whose long poem The Waste Land a century ago is taken by the intelligentsia to

What's in a name? Suppose you are given the name of a well-known character in fiction, could this determine the sort of person you

Unnoticed I am going away/ Just as nobody saw me come./I clasp my hands and bow my head/As clouds puff up in the west…

Last weekend I went in search of my Nanna's bungalow. Seventy years ago, during World War II and in the years just after it, my mother and I had stayed with her mother in her bungalow in Erith, a small Thameside port, now part of Greater London.

“Would not the immolation of a daughter of India and a son of England awaken India to its continued state of subjugation and England to the iniquities of its proceedings?” - Bina Das (1932).