Robert Allen

Who are these Fowlers

‘Who are these Fowlers?’ wrote a reviewer in the New York Times , quoted on page 56 of this much-needed biography of the more famous of the brothers, Henry Watson Fowler. The review was not of Modern English Usage or any of their other well-known books, but of an earlier work they wrote for Oxford University Press, a translation of the Syrian Greek writer Lucian of Samosata, published in 1905, the work that first brought them into contact with the strange world of academic publishing.

Choosing the right words: Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English , Longman, 1999, Longman (pp. xxviii+1204) Languages do die: Language Death , by David Crystal, Cambridge University Press, 0-521-65321-5, 2000, hb UK £12.95, US

Reviews of Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English , and Language Death , by David Crystal