Now revised, The Story of English is the first book to tell the whole story of the English language. Originally paired with a major PBS miniseries, this book presents a stimulating and comprehensive record of spoken and written English--from its Anglo-Saxon origins some two thousand years ago to the present day, when English is the dominant language of commerce and culture with more than one billion English speakers around the world. From Cockney, Scouse, and Scots to Gulla, Singlish, Franglais, and the latest African American slang, this sweeping history of the English language is the...

Of course there can never be enough Jeeves for die-hard Wodehouse enthusiasts. But this selection brings old favorites to those fans in a sparkling package and will introduce new readers to the funniest writer in the English language. Right Ho, Jeeves; Joy in the Morning; and Very Good, Jeeves follow the adventures of two magnificently improbable characters. Bertie Wooster is an amiable young gentleman of excellent and ancient family so he says with plenty of money and no professional ambitions. Jeeves is his gentleman's gentleman, the soul of discretion, and a deep thinker, at least compared...

It seems impossible: a small island in the North Atlantic, colonized by Rome, then pillaged for hundreds of years by marauding neighbors, becomes the dominant world power in the nineteenth century. In this provocative new look at the course of empire, Robert McCrum shows how the language of the Anglo-American imperium has become the world's lingua franca. In the twenty-first century, writes the author, English + Microsoft = Globish.

My Year Off is an eloquent story of hope, written with the sort of candor and detail that the author believes has been missing in the literature of strokes up to this time. It is as well a grown-up love story of the most realistic -- and hence, inspiring -- kind.