With one-liners to rival Oscar Wilde or Mae West, she showed that satirical language can be soft and silly as well as wry and sharp. She will be missedVictoria Wood was an expert at encouraging us to lampoon language. Her forensically crafted writing was a warm, open invitation to point and laugh at the one thing above all else that makes us human: words.More specifically, the northern dialect of the English language. Lucy Mangan wrote about how her characters called their magazines “books” – idiosyncratically northern. Wood gave voice to something that characterises many of her delicious personas: a campness, in the Susan Sontag sense of the word. Her acute eye resulted in writing that was both well observed and ridiculous. Bringing out the camp in the northern housewife was oxymoronic: it added a linguistic layer of glamour to her downtrodden identity. This won her legions of devoted gay fans, including me. It blazed a trail for the comedy that could soften the Corrie matriarch. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2016-04-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
John Murray is to publish Thing Explainer, the follow-up to Randall Munroe’s What If? In Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, Munroe uses a series of diagrams to show how a variety of things, from a nuclear bomb to a biro, work. He will use just the drawings and a vocabulary of... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-05-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A fitting salute to the Guardian's late parliamentary sketch writerI thought it unnecessary, and perhaps ethically dubious, to cover this book when its first edition came out in 2012; but now, following Simon Hoggart's death earlier this month, and the addition of a selection from a year's worth... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-01-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Favorites among year's six Booker Prize finalists — which "shows the English language novel to be a form of world literature" — are Jim Crace and Eleanor Catton. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2013-09-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Oxford University Press will shortly launch a consultation over jobs in its English Language... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2013-03-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Razorbill, the teenage imprint of Penguin Children's, has done the first English language... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-09-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Thu, 27/10/2011 - 09:00 The Publishers Association's international conference will focus on issues such as export sales and the growth of the English language, with speakers to include Barnes and Noble vice-president of digital content Theresa... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-10-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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