Andrew Brown: A Brief History of Encyclopaedias
(Hesperus, 2011)
Anyone who includes spoof encyclopedia titles on the book cover (A Complete Guide to Dysslexia), and starts a book about encyclopedias with a joke can’t be entirely dismissed. Andrew Brown …
Tom McArthur’s book is essential reading in the world of reference, although perhaps that is faint praise for a subject that has so few books dedicated to it. However, reading the book is tough going. The author makes it difficult for …
I’ve been reading about the French Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, in the lovely illustrated Gallimard Decouvertes volume authored by Francois Moureau, which he entitles Le roman vrai de l’Encyclopédie [ The real novel of the Encyclopedia], first published 1990). …
Everyone remembers the memorable subtitle of Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That. The two “genuine dates” are of course 55BC and 1066. It was true when the book was written (1930) and today that these are the two most …
The remarkable (and almost accidental) nature of this book was revealed very clearly quite by chance, in David Thomson’s obituary of the publisher Tom Rosenthal, who died in January 2004. In it he described the genesis of the Biographical Dictionary of …
Denis Hollier’s collective work A New History of French Literature (1989) has a conventional-sounding title, but is anything but conventional in its arrangement. Instead of a chronological narrative, which is what the title suggests, or an A to Z listing of …
An Illustrated Dictionary of Architecture: sounds like the perfect combination, a book combining text with pictures just when you need it. Compiled by two experienced …
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Philip Thody and Howard Evans: Faux Amis and Key Words: a dictionary-guide to French Language, Culture and Society (1985) (published in the US as Mistakable French)
Reference books for learning a language include some of the dullest titles ever …
Reading Time: < 1 minuteReviews to be posted in the new few weeks include:
Encyclopedias of the Enlightenment
– there are several; this batch enables a typical French academic reference to be compared with a volume for the US college market.
Dictionnaire de la …
Here is the entry for “oak” from Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates, 1873 edition. This reference book, unique to the best of my knowledge, combines a brief definition or background, usually very brief, and some interesting significant dates around the topic. Here, …
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