Acknowledgements

[]()The author and publishers thank the following for permission to reproduce material in this book: The Estate of the late Sir Alan Herbert for a passage from What a Word by A.P. Herbert, and to Dr J.B. Searle for his limerick ‘There was a young man of Dunlaoghaire’.

André Deutsch Ltd/Little Brown/Curtis Brown Ltd for two lines from the poem ‘The Octopus’ by Ogden Nash.

The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Masefield for two lines from the poem ‘Cargoes’.

‘Politics and the English Language’ by George Orwell copyright © George Orwell, 1946 by permission of A.M. Heath on behalf of Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd and Mark Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell.

The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of A.E. Housman for the extract from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ from The Collective Poems of A.E. Housman.

David Higham Associates and New Directions for the extract from Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’.

Random House UK Ltd for the extract from D.J. Enright’s A Mania for Sentences.

Faber & Faber Ltd and Harcourt, Brace & Company for the extract from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ from The Four Quartets.

Every effort has been made to contact the holders of copyright material but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary alterations at the first opportunity.