Category: Books

David Crystal’s The Stories of English is a fascinating book, shot through with honest passion for the language (also on display in his excellent Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language). It’s a long book, and closely typeset on long lines, so I wouldn’t recommend buying the paperback unless your eyesight is very good.

The book tells the unexpurgated story of English, including its dialects and non-standard forms. Mr Crystal, rightly, puts just as much weight on ‘dialect’ English as on the RP/standard forms, and the book tells a story of a lively language that the 18th century tried to put in corsets. But now with the rise of the Internet & othr cmnctn techs, the lngge is brkng 3 agn.

The story of how English was standardised was a surprise to traditionally-educated me. Mr Crystal’s case that rules don’t really matter, and only comprehension does is very persusive, and I for one pledge to not even slightly worry about split infinitives any more.

****

paradiastole – rewording a bad thing to make it seem good, or a good thing to make it seem bad. So: drunkenness – good companionship or clemency – weakness.

Picked up in the New York Review of Books, talking about Quentin Skinner‘s work on rhetoric and political theory.

A 1991 interview with the author of A Minor Apocalypse and The Polish Complex.

Hotel Babylon is an entertaining book – it takes you through a fictional day in a fictional hotel, but is a vehicle for real stories and anecdotes about life working in a luxury London hotel. It feels like a snack rather than a full meal – the type is large, and the margins wide – but it’s written in a punchy, cynical style that keeps the pace going. In its darkness, it reminded me slightly of the Mike Leigh film Croupier. Not as disgusting as Kitchen Confidential, and unlikely to be as controversial, but a good read.

I bought a book at Hatchards on Piccadilly the other day. I’m very fond of it – I’ve been going there since I was a kid – but it really is the prime bookshop of the Buffer Zone (that area of wine merchants, hatters, art dealers etc., around St. James’s Palace). If you don’t believe me, take a look at their picks of the season, packed with double-barrelled names and books on gardening. And no Da Vinci Code in sight.

A fantastic multi-lingual edition of Catullus.

If you want an illustration of the way things are today (TM), you can’t do better than to walk into Waterstones Piccadilly. I went in there at lunchtime looking for a book about Papal elections (this one), and I couldn’t find a copy on the shelves. This was not because they had sold out through demand.

What was on the shelves, by the hundreds and on a special half-price offer? The bloody Da Vinci Code, of course.

I’ve just finished listening to “Dawn to Decadence” – an audiobook of Jacques Barzun’s magnum opus. With reservations, I would recommend it.

The best parts of the book come at the start. Mr Barzun clearly has a comprehensive knowledge and deep understanding for a broad range of European culture, from Charlemagne to Goethe and beyond. The detail and anecdotes set out in that section are full of fascinating people and stories I’d never heard.

My reservations surround the last part of the book. Mr Barzun, in turning to what he sees as modern ‘decadence’, is much less convincing. I am very Whiggish in my beliefs, but Mr Barzun’s last few chapters have a strongly Blimpish or Burkeian air, detailing time after time the way in which some modern innovation (including the welfare state and human rights) is facile, futile, and wrong. The mostly unspoken subtext is that the old ways were the better, or an echo of Kingsley Amis’s comment on university expansion – “more will mean worse”.

Individually, Mr Barzun’s opinions are not necessarily wrong, and the use of ‘decadence’ in the title is perhaps warning enough. But the absence of any positive elements of the modern world, and the relentless tabulation of present evils, makes the final section of the book too much of a Jeremiad for my taste.

Tom Wolfe wins the Literary Review’s Bad Sex award.