For those casting about for last-minute presents, here are some possibilities:
1) Orin Hargraves (see this LH post) has produced an excellent book on clichés, It’s Been Said Before
I will have failed in my mission with any reader who, after perusing this book for minutes, hours, or days, feels at liberty to dismiss me as a usage curmudgeon. I have no agenda to reform English. I embrace the whole mansion of it, from the dankest corner of promotional blurb to the grandest auditorium of epic poetry. It is out of love and respect for it that I write about it. It is a tall order to suggest to speakers and writers that they choose their words more carefully and that they be more circumspect about using words whose presence does not add meaningfully to what they are saying, but I fully own that there is a respect in which this book urges that advice.
2) Neil MacGregor’s Shakespeare’s Restless World: Portrait of an Era
3) Slavica Publishers (see this LH post) is publishing a series Russia’s Great War & Revolution, “a decade-long multinational scholarly effort that aims to fundamentally transform understanding of Russia’s ‘continuum of crisis’ during the years 1914-1922.” I haven’t seen any of the books yet (and at $44.95, the ones so far published are too pricey for my budget), but I have every confidence that they’re worth reading.
“I have no agenda to reform English. I embrace the whole mansion of it,”
I have always thought of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy as one big analogy to the English language.
“Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.” —Sam: Johnson on the Giant’s Causeway.
(He never saw it.)