John Sutherland

My Own Private Idiolect

The Language Wars: A History of Proper English

By

John Murray 408pp £17.99 order from our bookshop

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel

By

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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