A Mouthful of Air
by Anthony Burgess
Burgess is a remarkable polymath. A Mouthful of Air is a very weird and wonderful book about language in general, not just about English
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“Burgess, to me, is a remarkable polymath. One of the problems is that he wrote so much that there’s almost too much to grapple with. A Mouthful of Air is a very weird and wonderful book about language in general, not just about English. About half the book is specifically about English, but the first half is called “Language and languages” and there’s stuff in it about Latin, Russian and Japanese – and music as well. It’s very wide-ranging and, as you’d expect from Burgess, it’s a quirky book, dense with factual insights and wry opinions.” Read more...
Henry Hitchings, Linguist
