Gordon Johnson's review concludes that Amartya Sen's latest book The Argumentative Indian 's "use of history is... unscrupulous and trivialising". (Books, September 30). Hardly a surprise since I showed the same about Sen's best-known work on famine 20 years ago ("A refutation of Sen's theory of famine", Food Policy , volume 11, issue 2, May 1986).
Peter Bowbrick Nottingham