John Sutherland
My Own Private Idiolect
The Language Wars: A History of Proper English
By Henry Hitchings
John Murray 408pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel
By Nicholas Ostler
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 330pp £20 order from our bookshop
You can keep a dinner party conversation going for hours by asking who our greatest living historian is. You could keep it going for days by asking who our greatest living novelist is. Ask, however, who our greatest living linguist is and you will hear nothing but the clatter of cutlery on crockery.
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