What is language?Why do we have it?Why does that matter?Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing accomplishment and one that remains poorly understood.Upe...
'Dazzling... Pinker's big idea is that language is an instinct...as innate to us as flying is to geese... Words can hardly do justice to the superlative range and liveliness of Pinker's investigati...
How did the first forty years of H. G. Wells' life shape the father of science fiction?From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himse...
An accessible introduction to a writer whose work is of timeless significance and whose unconventional life is a continuous source of fascination.In 1907, when she was twenty-five and n...
Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own, and when she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. E...
"We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts go...