*A TIME, New Yorker, Financial Times and History Today Book of the Year*'Hilarious' Sam Leith'I loved this book' Susie Dent''Witty and affectionate' Lynne TrussPerfect for book …
'More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to...'Only Bill Bryson could make a book about the English language so entertaining. …
Where does the ampersand get its name from? What does the hashtag have to do with commerce in ancient Rome? Keith Houston gives the answers in this delightfully entertaining …
In the century since its birth, the crossword has evolved into the world's most popular intellectual pastime: a unique form of wordplay, the codes and conventions of which are open …
*A TIME, New Yorker, Financial Times and History Today Book of the Year*'Hilarious' Sam Leith'I loved this book' Susie Dent''Witty and affectionate' Lynne TrussPerfect for book …
Nothing inflames the language gripers like a misplaced disinterested, an illogical irregardless, a hideous operationalisation. To purists these are 'howlers' and 'non-words', fit …
In this provocative and persuasive new book, Nicholas Ostler challenges our assumption that English will continue to dominate as the global lingua franca. Drawing on his …
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos asks: how do we really make ourselves understood to other people? This funny, wise and life-affirming language book shows how, from puns …
From 'shotclog', a Yorkshire term for a companion only tolerated because he is paying for the drinks, to Albanian having 29 words to describe different kinds of eyebrows, the …
Vocabulary alone isn't enough. To survive in the most sophisticated - and the most scathing - nation on Earth you will need to understand the many peculiarities of the (very …
