Between You and I

  "A deeply-felt defence of proper English usage" Robert McCrum, Observer "Witty and provocative" Sunday Herald "Authoritative, funny and always completely correct." Good Book Guide A waspish review of the massacre of the Queen's English, introduced by Britain's best-loved radio journalist John Humphrys. Here is a new, enlarged edition of the book described by The Independent as a "cool,…

Bob Wilson's Ultimate Collection of Peculiar Sporting Lingo

  Have you ever flashed at a googly in the corridor of uncertainty while on a sticky dog? Maybe you've seen someone hit a mulligan out of the screws to grab a birdie at Amen Corner, or had to deal with a falling leaf from God while trying to survive the Group of Death? The world of sport has its own language, wonderfully rich in strange words and phrases, whose origins often stretch back ce…

Googlies, Nutmegs & Bogeys: The Origins of Peculiar Sporting Lingo

  'Wilson conducts an engaging romp through sport's more colourful terminology ... buy it to be entertained.' Independent 'Brilliant. I loved it!' David Seaman 'A cracking read' Daily Express 'A lesson in the language of sport from a man that should know' Kevin Keegan OBE The world of sport has its own language, rich in strange words and phrases whose origins often stretch back centu…

Introducing Camus

  Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, always refused the existentialist label with which he is usually associated. For Camus, the world was 'absurd', without purpose, leading only unto death, yet all the more invigorating precisely because of this. Long associated with Left-Bank intellectuals, Camus' real emotional centre was always his native Algeria and the pove…

Introducing Chomsky

  'Lucid, witty and exact.' New Statesman and Society The epoch-making theories of linguist Noam Chomsky maintain that the human brain has an innate language faculty, and that part of this biological endowment is a 'universal grammar', a theory of principles common to all languages. Thus, all human languages and the ways in which children learn them are remarkably similar. Chomsky's book Sy…

Introducing Kafka

  'Goes far beyond explication or popularization or survey - a work of art in its own right.' Amazon.com 'What do I have in common with the Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself.' Nothing could better express the essence of Franz Kafka, a man described by his friends as living behind a 'glass wall'. Kafka wrote in the tradition of the great Yiddish storytellers, whose …

Introducing Linguistics

Language, it is widely understood, both sets us apart from our fellow creatures and identifies us as uniquely human. We use language to establish and maintain group membership, to express our emotions, to amuse ourselves and to entertain others, to convey information serious and trivial and exist in a world populated by others. Linguistics is the discipline which studies the structure an…

Introducing Linguistics (pocket-sized version)

Language, it is widely understood, both sets us apart from our fellow creatures and identifies us as uniquely human. We use language to establish and maintain group membership, to express our emotions, to amuse ourselves and to entertain others, to convey information serious and trivial and exist in a world populated by others. Linguistics is the discipline which studies the structure and…

Introducing Semiotics (A Graphic Guide)

An animal’s cry, poetry, medical symptoms, media messages, language disorders, architecture, marketing, body language – all are signs, and their study is what semiotics is all about. Introducing Semiotics outlines the development of sign study from its precursors in the ancient world, via classical scholars like St Augustine and William of Ockham to to Charles Sanders Peirce – w…