Kingsley Amis
Snobs & Stuffed Shirts
Sayings of the Century
By Nigel Rees
Allen & Unwin 278pp £8.95 order from our bookshop
Wordly Wise
By James McDonald
Constable 303pp £9.95 order from our bookshop
The State of the Language: English Observed
By Philip Howard
Hamish Hamilton 192pp £8.95 order from our bookshop
I am not sure what the connection is between the decline of written and spoken English and the outpouring of books on words, not just dictionaries and guides to usage but collections of slang, quotations, proverbs, catch phrases, dialect expressions, paradoxes, bulls, euphemisms and puns just for a start. I have in my sell-off pile a work entirely devoted to oxymoron. (Volumes on hendiadys, synecdoche and aposiopesis to follow?)
But anyway, out they continue to pour. Nigel Rees, famous as a broadcaster on the subject, has collected hundreds of well-known modern sayings and traced them back to their origins. The stock of human knowledge is not much advanced by the enterprise
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'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw