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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'There can’t be many histories of London that have given room, for instance, to the Koreans of New Malden or the Bombay Emporium of Mayfair in the 1930s.'
Jerry White on @profpanayi's 'Migrant City'.
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'How do those of us who have enough to eat account for hunger? We often imagine it’s about drought, famine, lack of rain, corruption and incompetence. We need to be much more imaginative.'
@moorehl reviews 'Hunger' by @martin_caparros.
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