Anxious about apostrophes? In a pickle over your pronouns and prepositions? Fear not—Mr. Gwynne is here with his wonderfully concise and highly enjoyable book of grammar. Within these pages, adults and children alike will find all they need to rediscover this lost science and sharpen up their skills. Mr. Gwynne believes that happiness depends at least partly on good grammar—and Mr. Gwynne is never wrong.

A remarkably perceptive and vivid life of William Cobbett, one of England's greatest radicals. The early years of the nineteenth century were ones of misery and oppression. The common people were thrown into conditions of extreme poverty by enclosures and the Agricultural Revolution, and the long Tory administration of Lord Liverpool saw its task as keeping law and order at all costs. The cause of reform was a dangerous one, as William Cobbett was to find. Cobbett is best known for his Rural Rides, that classic account of early-nineteenth century Britain which has never been out of print. But he was a much greater figure than that implies, being the foremost satirist and proponent of reform of the time. He had an invincible stomach for provoking the deceit and vanity of the supposedly good and great, and had an abiding hatred of the establishment, or 'The Thing', as he christened it.

William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England offers a thorough re-appraisal of William Cobbett (1763-1835), situating his journalism and rural radicalism in relation to contemporary political debates.

'The English language is like a fleet of juggernaut trucks that goes on regardless.' In this fascinating book, Robert Burchfield, editor of the four-volume Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, expertly stresses both the resilience and flexibility of the English language, tracing its history from the 5th century AD to the present day. From the days of runes to the origins of printing, through social, religious, political and industrial change in the eighteenth century, through the rise of the British Empire and the development of world English, and into the twentieth-century, the English language has undergone sweeping changes. 'the best brief survey I have read on the development of English' Anthony Burgess 'an expert, absorbing guide to the English-speaking world's biggest asset' Sunday Times 'It can be recommended without reservation to all who are sensitive to the subtlety, richness and power of the language they speak' British Book News 'so skilfully written that it must surely take a place among the best three or four books ever written about our language' Birmingham Post