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Over the last month I’ve been looking out for books which would make good Christmas gifts for readers. I’m covering one more item today and also listing the other four below this article. Today’s choice is a subscription to Slightly Foxed, a quarterly journal which calls itself “The Read Reader’s Quarterly”. I have periods of [...]
Christmas Gifts for Readers No. 4 I’m writing a set of five articles covering items which would in my view make great presents for people who love books and reading. I have no financial or commercial interest in any of these products and I’m only writing about them because [...] I occasionally review books about language and the origin of words and was drawn to Idiomantics which has the subtitle, “The Weird World of Popular Phrases”. With a recommendation from Gyles Brandreth (host of the BBC radio show Wordaholics) I decided to read the book to see how it compared to the rest of my [...] Like many people I am mildly interested in where words come from and I’ve occasionally read and reviewed books like David Crystal’s By Hook or By Crook which looks at where English place-names come from. Unless books like these are skilfully written they can quickly become tedious and its usually best to get this sort [...] Elif Batuman’s book of essays, The Possessed, loosely based on the joys of reading classic Russian literature, turns out to be a bit of a hodge-podge of travel-writing, literary criticism and a personal reading history, enlivened by a butterfly mind that flutters from one subject to another without really landing for too long on any [...] In The Prodigal Tongue, Mark Abley has provided us with a tour of the state of the English language in Britain and around the world. His main conclusion seems to be that although “English” is the new Esperanto, a world language spoken by people on every continent, its not so much standard English that predominates [...] With By Hook or By Crook David Crystal has provided us with an entertaining travelogue of selected part of (mostly) England and Wales. The reader accompanies Crystal as he meanders around various small towns (Haye on Wye, Stratford on Avon etc), finding many interesting places along the way and recounting many tales and anecdotes about [...] |
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