One of Britain’s clever and funnier columnists, Marina Hyde applies her acerbic wit to the Coronavirus pandemic by recalling the Great Plague that descended on London over three centuries ago. Noting the recollection of that grisly time in Daniel Defoe’s memoir written some five decades after the event, she reveals how his “Journal of the […]

As though following on seamlessly from the previous blogpost, a recent article in The Guardian asks “Will Brexit spell the end of English as an official EU language?” The article is book-ended with a couple of playfully incendiary rhetorical grenades: an EU official suggesting that “if we don’t have the UK, we don’t have English” […]

The eternal question about English being in decline – or not – assumes that this is a binary choice. No, it’s more nuanced than that. Questions about the supposed decline of the English language have been around for centuries and, no doubt, will persist for many more. A flurry of interest was provoked by a […]

We cannot lose sight of how reading is affected by the evolving – and quickening – technologies associated with the act of writing By one of those odd coincidences that encourages the credulous to believe in fate, I was on my way to absorb The British Library’s summer exhibition “Writing: Making your Mark” when I […]

Where we meet and what we say certainly matters, but how we behave in those places often proves instrumental in achieving results Imagine the fascination of examining the diverse cultures of our world through a study of their chief gathering places. How and why do people come to gather in one location rather than another, […]

In exploring the context in which humanity’s generations live out their lives, is our existence more accurately seen as a carousel or a rollercoaster? A recent article in The New Yorker reviews what it calls the “decline in historical thinking” and makes it clear that what is at risk is less about the names and […]

A smile that can only be prompted by irony was raised within days of last week’s blogpost about one gospel’s claim that “In the beginning was the word.” News arrived of a major new gallery opening in September at London’s Science Museum, looking at the rise of London as a global centre of scientific excellence. […]

Any reading of the gospel of St John has to come up short even before the initial throat-clearing has finished. It begins with a claim derived from no primary sources and based upon no credible authority, asserting that “in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the word was God”. […]

Before the plunge into the home straight, launching our Cradle of English and its platform of podcasts in celebration of the English language, we took out a week to relax. Only the one week, this summer being as busy as it is, but it has been very much the proverbial change that’s as good as […]