Have You Eaten Grandma?

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I particularly enjoyed the historical info and info on differences between British and American English. Brandreth also covers spelling in this book, with common (and sometimes less than helpful) rules, guides to prefixes and silent letters. Overall a fun and informative read that's already come in useful at work (it settled a discussion on the plural of clerk of works? This book won't take the place of my beloved Garner's American Usage (now Modern English Usage in the 4th edition) but it certainly deserves a place on my bookcase and in my recommendations to students. With Susie Dent, the lexicographer from Countdown, he co-hosts the award-winning podcast, Something Rhymes with Purple.

This has a much nicer tone than Eats Shoots and Leaves, so I'd recommend it over that one to people who want to learn more about usage. In this irreverent and conversational style guide, Brandreth makes improving one's langauge skills easy and even fun. And this is knowledge that you can get other places – where it’s not sandwiched between two slices of moldy bread. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light.In 2018, “Meet me at McDonald’s” isn’t an invitation; bizarrely, it’s the name some young people have given a fashionable haircut that involves a closely shaven back and sides with an unruly mop on top. Yet when he chances across the naked corpse of sixteen-year-old Billy Wood, posed by candlelight in a dark, stifling attic room, he cannot ignore the brutal murder.

Since the coming of Star Trek in 1966, when “to boldly go where no man has gone before” was what the now-iconic TV series promised to do, we’ve all been at it. My particular favourite is the new ROFL (rolling on floor laughing) for older generations, ROFLACGU (rolling on floor laughing and can’t get up). Gyles presents Great Canal Journeys on Channel 4 with Dame Sheila Hancock and regularly appears on Celebrity Gogglebox with Dame Maureen Lipman. Wilde - at the height of his fame and fortune - cannot know what has begun when he proposes a game of 'Murder', in which each of his dinner guests must list the names of those they would most like to kill.I'm no Grammar Nazi - I can't claim to have full command of the English language myself: I nearly always need to Google who or whom, and lie or lay. It happens only very rarely here: I counted a couple of mis-identified Americanisms and two unfortunate dangling participles. The subject of the sentence is absolutely not the person or thing doing the action – that’s the agent and that’s a semantic analysis. I hate-read this book out of stubbornness as I lost the receipt and found myself stuck with this insufferable author.