John Banville

Secrets of the Oxford English Dictionary

The Surgeon of Crowthorne

By Simon Winchester

Wallace Arnold

Thin Ice

The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage

By Kingsley Amis

Andrew Billen

The Reason Why Counts Became Earls

Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English

By Geoffrey Hughes

Jonathan Meades

Words Fail Me

It’s Been Said Before: A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Clichés

By Orin Hargraves

Tim Bale

Lost for Words

Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?

By Mark Thompson

Dennis Sewell

Words to the Wise

The Kingdom of Speech

By Tom Wolfe

Bernard Sharratt

Class in the Novel

Attitude to Class in the English Novel: From Walter Scott to David Storey

By Mary Eagleton and David Pierce

Kingsley Amis

Get it Right

A Word in Your Ear

By Philip Howard

Jonathan Meades

Filthy French

Harraps Slang Dictionary English – French/French – English

By Georgette A Marks and Charles B Johnson (Ed) Jane Pratt

Kingsley Amis

Snobs & Stuffed Shirts

Sayings of the Century

By Nigel Rees

Wordly Wise

By James McDonald

The State of the Language: English Observed

By Philip Howard

Charles Allen

It’s All Cuneiform to Me

Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon

By Lesley Adkins

John Sutherland

My Own Private Idiolect

The Language Wars: A History of Proper English

By Henry Hitchings

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel

By Nicholas Ostler

David Profumo

Lost in Translation

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes

By Jim Holt

Harry Mount

It Came, It Saw, It Conquered

Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

By Nicholas Ostler

Diarmaid Ó Muirithe

Towers of Babel

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

By Nicholas Ostler

Patrick Wilcken

Vowels of Anguish

Saussure

By John E Joseph

Patrick Wilcken

Words to the Wise

Language: The Cultural Tool

By Daniel L Everett

Nicholas Bagnall

More than Words

Dr Johnson’s Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World

By Henry Hitchings

Harry Mount

Alphabet Soup

Spell it out: the singular story of English spelling

By David Crystal

John Sutherland

Nomenculture

Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature

By Alastair Fowler