While in a Russian-administered holding camp in Katowice, Poland, in 1945, Primo Levi was asked to provide a report on living conditions in Auschwitz. Published the following year, it was subsequently forgotten and remained unknown to a wider public.Dating from the weeks and months immediately after the war, Auschwitz Report details the authors' harrowing deportation to Auschwitz, and how those who disembarked from the train were selected for work or extermination. As well...

A breakthrough in paediatric medicine. A battle-scarred tomcat. A tribe in the South American rainforest.How could they possibly be connected?Lesbian literary scholar Morgan Byrd has no time for babies, or cats. But when the disappearance of her university's resident tomcat is rapidly followed by baby snatching and murder, Morgan is drawn into the police inquiry, alongside ten-year-old Oliver Cresswell, a maths prodigy tur...

Writing about Literature combines detailed practical and scholarly advice with a sense of the scope and creative possibilities of literary criticism, empowering the student reader to make his or her own discoveries and experiments with language. In addition, it gives valuable guidance on adult language learning and translation skills for students of foreign literature.This handy, accessible guide covers all aspects of the essay-writing process, including:prel...

'My first English lesson was grammar with the terrifying Mrs Petrie. She spent the entire time marching up and down the classroom, thwacking various items of school furniture with a ruler while she banged on about the ING part of the verb. I sat there, vibrating with fear, desperately trying to figure out what on earth she could mean. Irregular Negative Gerund? Intransitive Nominative Genitive? It was only years later, when I was teaching English to foreign students, that I realised that E...

For Who the Bell Tolls is a book that explains the grammar that people really need to know, such as the fact that an apostrophe is the difference between a company that knows its s*** and a company that knows it's s***, or the importance of capital letters to avoid ambiguity in such sentences as 'I helped my Uncle Jack off his horse.'David Marsh's lifelong mission has been to create order out of chaos. For four decades, he has worked for newspapers, from the Sun t...

Lynne Truss's 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' injected new life into the long-standing arguments over rights and wrongs in English usage. Now David Crystal brings together his own distinctive style and unique expertise to provide the first thorough-going assessment of the ongoing debate. With a lively, humorous, and accessible approach, Crystal charts the battles past and present, illustrating the characters and attitudes involved from a wide range of written sources. He combines a chronological...

The Oxford Companion to the English Language provides an authoritative single-volume source of information about the English language. It is intended both for reference and for browsing. The first edition of this landmark Companion, published in 1998, adopted a strong international perspective, covering topics from Cockney to Creole, Aboriginal English to Caribbean English and a historical range from Chaucer to Chomsky, Latin to the World Wide Web. It succinctly described and disc...

The English Language is spoken by more than a billion people throughout the world. But where did English come from? And how has it evolved into the language used today? In How English Became English Simon Horobin investigates the evolution of the English language, examining how the language continues to adapt even today, as English continues to find new speakers and new uses. Engaging with contemporary concerns about correctness, Horobin considers whether such changes are improvem...

Using evidence provided by the world's largest language databank, the Oxford English Corpus, Butterfield uncovers fascinating facts about the English language. Where does our vocabulary come from? How do word meanings change? How is our language really being used? This entertaining book has the up-to-date and authoritative answers to all the key questions about our language. With over 2 billion words contained in the Oxford English Corpus, Butterfield takes a thorough look at the English l...

A more-ishly browsable collection of words and phrases, linguistic quirks, lexical oddities and syntactic surprises.Our langauge is one of delight and curiosity. BUTTERING PARSNIPS, TWOCKING CHAVS is a guided tour of English, exploring the origins of words, their changing meaning, lexical peculiarities, word games and lost words, presented in lists, small passages of narrative text, amusing quotations and nuggets of amazing facts.This must-have compendium s...

History of English: * covers the development of the English language from the 5th century to the present day* contains a `mini-corpus' of texts, used for exercises and to illustrate points raised in the commentary* introduces key linguistic concepts* provides `discussion points' to generate debate* involves readers in collecting and analysing their own data

Now in its fourth edition, Poetry: The Basics remains an engaging exploration of the exciting and diverse world of poetry. Jeffrey Wainwright’s accessible introduction demystifies poetic forms and traditions, which can at first seem bewildering.Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Dylan Thomas, and from around the English-speaking world, it shows how any reader can understand and gain pleasure from poetry. This comprehensive guide e...