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.
My guess is that if you asked Henry Hitchings he would shoot back the right answer: Randolph Quirk, Lord Quirk of Bloomsbury. Half a century ago Quirk and a team of colleagues set out to analyse how English people actually talked. The result was the Survey of English
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf