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contributors Jonathan Barnes is the author of three novels: The Somnambulist, The Domino Men and Cannonbridge. John Bew is Professor of History and Foreign Policy at the War Studies Department at King’s College London and author of Citizen Clem: A Life of Attlee, which won the 2017 Orwell Prize. Paul Bew is Professor Emeritus of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. Michael Bloch is the author of some twenty books, including six about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. His latest publication is Closet Queens (Little, Brown). Charlie Campbell is a literary agent at Kingsford Campbell and author of Scapegoat and Herding Cats. John Carlin writes for the Spanish newspaper El País. Jeremy Clarke writes the Low Life column in The Spectator. Lucy Daniel is the author of a biography of Gertrude Stein (Reaktion Books). Richard Davenport-Hines is completing a biography of John Meade Falkner. Patricia Fara is President of the British Society for the History of Science. Her books include the prize-winning Science: A Four Thousand Year History (OUP). Caroline Finkel is the author of Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923 ( John Murray). John Harwood’s most recent novel is The Asylum. James Holland is a historian and author of War in the West. Kevin Jackson’s next publication will be a brief history of Ellis Island, entitled Huddled Masses. David Jays writes for the Sunday Times and The Guardian, and is editor of Dance Gazette. Jonathan Keates’s most recent book is The Siege of Venice (Chatto & Windus). Anna Keay is author of The Last Royal Rebel: The Life & Death of James, Duke of Monmouth (2016) and director of the Landmark Trust. Mary Kenny is an Irish writer and journalist whose most recent publication, A Day at a Time, is a book of reflections. Jake Kerridge is a journalist and critic. Since writing this review, he has suffered a nightmare induced by the book under discussion. Sam Leith’s new book, Write to the Point: How to Be Clear, Correct & Persuasive on the Page, is published by Profile Books. Christian Lorentzen is the book critic for New York Magazine and film critic for New Republic. Alberto Manguel is director of the National Library of Argentina. Jessica Mann’s latest book is The Stroke of Death (Crowood). Allan Massie’s most recent book is End Games in Bordeaux. Leo McKinstry is currently working on a book about the political relationship between Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee. Keith Miller works at the Daily Telegraph and is the author of a book on St Peter’s. Sean O’Brien’s ninth collection of poems, Europa, will be published by Picador in spring 2018. He has won the T S Eliot and Forward Prizes. His novel Once Again Assembled Here is now out in paperback. Richard Overy is writing a global history of the Second World War. Lucy Popescu is the editor of A Country of Refuge, a collection of writing on asylum seekers. A Country to Call Home, focusing on the experiences of refugee children, will be published by Unbound in June 2018. Jane Ridley is working on a biography of King George V. Hannah Rosefield is a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard University. Alan Ryan is Emeritus Professor of Political Thought at Oxford. Miranda Seymour is a biographer and critic who has just completed a book about Lord Byron’s wife and daughter. David Stafford is the author of Mission Accomplished: SOE & Italy 1943–1945 (The Bodley Head). David Stevenson is Professor of International History at the LSE. His latest book, 1917: War, Peace & Revolution, is published this month by OUP. John Sutherland’s addiction memoir, Last Drink to LA, is published by Short Books. Alan Taylor is a writer, journalist and editor of the Scottish Review of Books. His books include Glasgow: The Autobiography. Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark will be published by Birlinn in November. Jeremy Treglown’s books include a biography of Anthony Powell’s school friend, the novelist Henry Green. Mary Wellesley works in the Department of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts at the British Library. Clair Wills’s new book, Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Britain, is newly out from Penguin. A N Wilson’s most recent book is Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker ( John Murray). Christopher Woodward is the author of In Ruins (Chatto & Windus). Literary Review | october 2017 4
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diary sam leith mation mark, if you like, pulling rank on its curly cousin to express a forceful rhetorical question: both of those are by way of exclamation rather than question; not asking for an answer. Is that grammati Only a maniac would want to write a book about language and usage. It is the equivalent of poking your head quite deliberately into a hole in the ground containing a huge wasps’ nest. So quite why I gave in to my publisher and wrote Write to the Point, I can’t exactly say. The problem is, as my old friend Henry Hitchings put it in his own book on the subject, ‘the language wars’ are still going strong. To Be or To Not Be If you set about saying that it doesn’t matter a toss whether infinitives are split or modifiers dangle, you risk being buried under a mountain of letters denouncing you as barbaric, illiterate and one of those idiots whose trendy views are responsible for the decline of our education system, the coarsening of the language and the loss of the Empire. I once received an angry letter, handwritten on paper and posted with a first-class stamp, because I had used ‘snuck’ as the past tense of ‘to sneak’. cal? It’s an open question. My favourite discovery in researching these matters, incidentally, has been the intervention of the actor Christopher Walken. ‘I’ve heard that the symbol we use to signify a question (?) is, in origin, an Egyptian hieroglyph that represents a cat as seen from behind,’ he writes in his foreword to the KISS Guide to Cat Care (2001). ‘I wonder if the Egyptians were expressing suspicion or an inquiring mind … or something else?’ Read that aloud in your best Christopher Walken voice for maximum effect. As far as I’ve been able to discover, there is no evidence whatever for his assertion. If you thunder in, on the other hand, with old-fashioned views on the use of the subjunctive, the correct meanings of the words ‘decimate’ and ‘enormity’, or the monstrous wrongness of the so-called ‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’ (‘Tangerine’s 50p Each’), you will earn a drenching from the other side: you’re a reactionary ignoramus whose ideas about language are a series of half-understood misconceptions copied unthinkingly from snobbish 18th- and 19th-century bossy-bootses. The main reason such books get reviewed, then, is for the pleasure in identifying the mistakes they make and where they contradict their own advice, and in providing counterexamples to the ‘rules’ advanced by the author. I fully expect the usual drubbing. So why do it? It’s a good question. Actually, questions are one of my beefs in all this – specifically, question marks. I cannot read without wincing an email that begins, ‘Hello, I hope you are well?’ My inner prescriptivist cavils at it. We all have an inner prescriptivist: even Steven Pinker, in his The Sense of Style, spends one or two hundred pages pouring scorn on grammar pedants before admitting that he loathes comma splices. I loathe comma splices, also known as run-on sentences, too. But my particular obsession is the question mark. ‘I hope you are well’ is a statement rather than a question, so it does not take a question mark. Likewise, the question mark with ‘surely’: ‘Surely not?’ If it’s a sure thing, there’s no question about it, right? Surely so. And then there’s the question mark for indirect questions. ‘She wonders if he is going to keep going on about question marks for the whole article?’ The uncertainty is hers, not that of the author of the sentence. Question marks for direct questions and direct questions only, please, people. Yet even where I choose to plant my flag of resistance, the ground crumbles. In their huge The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Messrs Huddleston and Pullum discuss two instances in which direct questions don’t take question marks. They offer ‘Aren’t they lucky to have got away with it!’ and ‘Who cares what I think about it anyway!’ Here is the excla So, as I say: why do it? The answer is that I wondered, like Tony Blair in the glory days of the late 1990s, whether there might not be a Third Way. Peacemaker that I am, I surveyed the blasted battlefield and wondered if we might be able to organise a linguistic equivalent of the Christmas football game in no-man’s-land. My notion was to take a rhetorical approach: to remember that language is an instrumental art concerned with reaching an audience. Technically, prescriptivists are wrong about the way that language works and descriptivists, who study language as it is used rather than fulminate about how it should be used, are right. But we can turn the argument of the latter, a little, against them. If the important thing is to recognise the system as it is, rather than as it should be, we should also recognise that whether we like it or not a huge number of language users do hold these prejudices. It might not be a bad idea to pander to them a little if, as a civilian, your main aim is to find a receptive audience for your writing rather than win an academic argument about linguistics. What are called rules may better be called stylistic preferences or sociolinguistic norms. But it does to have a sense of them. I once watched the great Geoff Pullum – co-author of the aforementioned Cambridge Grammar – giving a talk. In it, he lamented that the authors of The Economist’s style guide had counselled against splitting infinitives. They did so on the grounds not that there was anything wrong with doing so, but that lots of people think there is and it will annoy them if you do. ‘This is the “idiots win” position!’ Pullum exclaimed with real anguish. He is one of my heroes. But I found myself thinking: I’m with The Economist. Suffering fools gladly – given how many of them there are knocking about – is not a bad idea. Let the idiots win. A defining property of language – as descriptivists never tire of telling us – is that if enough people get something wrong often enough, it becomes right. Jolly good, my publisher said on reading the completed manuscript. Your approach is: ‘There are no rules. Here are the rules.’ That will either please both sides or annoy everyone. I’m sure it’ll be the former. Tony Blair’s pretty popular these days, right? r october 2017 | Literary Review 5

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contributors

Jonathan Barnes is the author of three novels: The Somnambulist, The Domino Men and Cannonbridge. John Bew is Professor of History and Foreign Policy at the War Studies Department at King’s College London and author of Citizen Clem: A Life of Attlee, which won the 2017 Orwell Prize. Paul Bew is Professor Emeritus of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. Michael Bloch is the author of some twenty books, including six about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. His latest publication is Closet Queens (Little, Brown). Charlie Campbell is a literary agent at Kingsford Campbell and author of Scapegoat and Herding Cats. John Carlin writes for the Spanish newspaper El País. Jeremy Clarke writes the Low Life column in The Spectator. Lucy Daniel is the author of a biography of Gertrude Stein (Reaktion Books). Richard Davenport-Hines is completing a biography of John Meade Falkner. Patricia Fara is President of the British Society for the History of Science. Her books include the prize-winning Science: A Four Thousand Year History (OUP). Caroline Finkel is the author of Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923 ( John Murray). John Harwood’s most recent novel is The Asylum. James Holland is a historian and author of War in the West. Kevin Jackson’s next publication will be a brief history of Ellis Island, entitled Huddled Masses. David Jays writes for the Sunday Times and The Guardian, and is editor of Dance Gazette. Jonathan Keates’s most recent book is The Siege of Venice (Chatto & Windus).

Anna Keay is author of The Last Royal Rebel: The Life & Death of James, Duke of Monmouth (2016) and director of the Landmark Trust. Mary Kenny is an Irish writer and journalist whose most recent publication, A Day at a Time, is a book of reflections. Jake Kerridge is a journalist and critic. Since writing this review, he has suffered a nightmare induced by the book under discussion. Sam Leith’s new book, Write to the Point: How to Be Clear, Correct & Persuasive on the Page, is published by Profile Books. Christian Lorentzen is the book critic for New York Magazine and film critic for New Republic. Alberto Manguel is director of the National Library of Argentina. Jessica Mann’s latest book is The Stroke of Death (Crowood). Allan Massie’s most recent book is End Games in Bordeaux. Leo McKinstry is currently working on a book about the political relationship between Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee. Keith Miller works at the Daily Telegraph and is the author of a book on St Peter’s. Sean O’Brien’s ninth collection of poems, Europa, will be published by Picador in spring 2018. He has won the T S Eliot and Forward Prizes. His novel Once Again Assembled Here is now out in paperback. Richard Overy is writing a global history of the Second World War.

Lucy Popescu is the editor of A Country of Refuge, a collection of writing on asylum seekers. A Country to Call Home, focusing on the experiences of refugee children, will be published by Unbound in June 2018.

Jane Ridley is working on a biography of King George V.

Hannah Rosefield is a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard University.

Alan Ryan is Emeritus Professor of Political Thought at Oxford.

Miranda Seymour is a biographer and critic who has just completed a book about Lord Byron’s wife and daughter.

David Stafford is the author of Mission Accomplished: SOE & Italy 1943–1945 (The Bodley Head).

David Stevenson is Professor of International History at the LSE. His latest book, 1917: War, Peace & Revolution, is published this month by OUP.

John Sutherland’s addiction memoir, Last Drink to LA, is published by Short Books.

Alan Taylor is a writer, journalist and editor of the Scottish Review of Books. His books include Glasgow: The Autobiography. Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark will be published by Birlinn in November.

Jeremy Treglown’s books include a biography of Anthony Powell’s school friend, the novelist Henry Green.

Mary Wellesley works in the Department of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts at the British Library.

Clair Wills’s new book, Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Britain, is newly out from Penguin.

A N Wilson’s most recent book is Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker ( John Murray).

Christopher Woodward is the author of In Ruins (Chatto & Windus).

Literary Review | october 2017 4

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