The Terrifying Vrooom
Colin Burrow: Empsonising, 15 July 2021
Some Versions of Pastoral
by William Empson, edited by Seamus Perry.
Oxford, 496 pp., £80, November 2020,978 0 19 965966 1 Show More
by William Empson, edited by Seamus Perry.
Oxford, 496 pp., £80, November 2020,
The Structure of Complex Words
by William Empson, edited by Helen Thaventhiran and Stefan Collini.
Oxford, 672 pp., £95, November 2020,978 0 19 871343 2 Show More
by William Empson, edited by Helen Thaventhiran and Stefan Collini.
Oxford, 672 pp., £95, November 2020,
“... in the social foundations of language use and linguistic change. It was a railway worker’s son, Raymond Williams, who ran with the idea that words had social histories embedded in them. His Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) was a book which Empson reviewed with an admiration qualified by the lordly but feline observation, like a lion ... ”