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“... memory for such things. In the present book, he recalls a time when, in a San Francisco debate, ‘Randolph Quirk ... accused me of letting my needle get stuck’ – mild, in all conscience, by comparison with Patrick Owens, who is remembered for calling him, a couple of years earlier, ‘a remorseless and fatuous nitpicker’. This is surely ...”

“... There is a path in the rather dense forest of linguistics that respectable academics have been rather shy of treading in the past fifty years. This has not been so much because of the briars and potholes as because they haven’t liked the direction in which it was heading, they haven’t liked the footprints they could recognise, and above all, perhaps, because they have preferred to follow in the wake of contemporary trail-blazers claiming they were off to somewhere new ...”

“... English lexicography​ knocks Johnnie Walker into a tricuspidal fedora. Over four hundred years, and going stronger than ever. Of course, in the 16th century the market was for ‘bilingual’ dictionaries (especially Latin-English). We had to wait upon Robert Cawdrey in 1604 for a ‘monolingual’ model – aimed at ‘Ladies … or other unskilfull persons ...”

“... About thirty miles off the Turkish coast, and just south-east of Nikaria, in the Dodecanese, there is a Greek island locally known as Patmo. I begin with that geomorphic truth in order to demonstrate a non-trivial aspect of textual structure – namely, that while the last sentence of a discourse is measurably predictable, the first is not. Tradition has it that it was in or on Patmo or Patmos that St John the Divine saw the Apocalypse – a Greek word meaning the disclosure of long-term planning or the shape of things to come ...”

“... Among various worries I have about the degree subject English, the most serious is the decline (to near vanishing point in many universities) of historical language study. One accepts, of course, that there is an awful lot else to claim the attention of teachers and taught; that the literature of the past two hundred years alone is more than enough challenge for the three short years of undergraduate life ...”

“... is rare. Both, fortunately, are to be found in the Longman English Language Series edited by Randolph Quirk. This has so far produced a dozen good books, at least half of them works of high and lasting importance. The latest is among the best, and will appeal to, and beyond, the readership of the series as a whole. What Walter Nash sets out to ...”

“... I was lucky enough to be shown a proof copy of a book called The Use of English. This volume, by Randolph Quirk, did me and countless others a great service, by demonstrating how students of the English language – shuffling misfits corralled into a dusty corner of Literature’s great kingdom – might turn without excuse from their contemplation of ...”

“... people’s view, would be the honorand to whom this collection of essays is dedicated, Professor Randolph Quirk of University College, London. Thirty years of scholarly activity devoted primarily to the study of the English language have won him the deserved respect of academic colleagues both here and abroad. Doubtless one of the secrets of his success ...”

“... This is the third collection of Randolph Quirk’s occasional pieces to appear in ten years. Like its predecessors, it’s a good read: each essay is short and its argument easy to follow, each contains a good joke and an amusingly bad one, and each makes a definite point about language. The point is often one which could not very easily be made in a more serious context, not because the point is irresponsible or unscholarly but because it is conjectural ...”

“... it is a record of an essay in communication, being a version of eight public lectures given by Sir Randolph Quirk in Singapore in 1985-86. The lectures rehearse in detail the conditions under which texts are constructed, the creative rules which all successful writers acknowledge, though they perhaps could not enumerate them. Sir ...”

“... whom?’?The blurb to the wonderful vast new Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk-Greenbaum-Leech-Svartvik) says truly of its quadrumvirate that they are ‘acknowledged to be leading authorities in the field of English language’. If they are authorities, then, as human beings and as an institution, they are susceptible of ...”

“... the poetry of. The expert view, as I’ve said, seems to be that there is nothing to worry about; Randolph Quirk, who has surveyed modern English like nobody else, affirms, in his usual learned and jovial manner, that English-speaking humanity is doing pretty well; that foul language is not more prevalent than it was, merely subject to a different social ...”

“... On 10 May 1933 an undergraduate at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, wrote in her diary a description of the clothes she was wearing on that sultry summer’s day. The description includes the phrase blue celanese trollies. The diary entry in question was not published until 1984, by which time the diarist, Barbara Pym, had become a cult figure in English literary circles ...”

“... between English and another language. Professional linguists (among them Sidney Greenbaum and Randolph Quirk) jostle with poets and novelists (including Medbh McGuckian and Amy Tan). David Dabydeen writes ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, and discusses, in impeccably establishment English, a question that might just as well ...”