The only meaningful way to review a dictionary, particularly one as all-encompassing and weighty as this 834-page, 3.5kg behemoth, is to test it against the database of your own knowledge of its subject. In this case it’s spirits and cocktails, or, for this reviewer, mostly spirits.
I have to confess that, despite having been on the wagon for some time, I can claim a certain experience of the spirit world (nothing to do with spiritualism), gained during my Soviet youth and later – particularly when researching my own ‘Borders Up! Eastern Europe through the Bottom of a Glass’.
Let’s open my book’s first edition to part two, ‘Spirits Lands’, where the first word is ‘aqua vitae’. According to 'The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails’ (Oxford University Press, £45, ISBN 9780199311132) this is “one of the oldest European terms for distilled spirits, its first documented use coming in the 1270s in a series of similar treatises on distillation variously...