Quotes from Melvyn Bragg

Poets that lasting marble seek Must carve in Latin or in Greek: We write in sand, our language grows And like the tide, our work o'erflows.

Squanto engineered the survival of the Pilgrim Fathers and it was because of his help that an English-speaking society eventually prevailed there. Their own language had saved them.

The Internet took off in English and although there are now fifteen hundred languages on the Internet, seventy percent of it is still in English.

He wanted to remove silent letters and reform the whole business. He sent his scheme to his friend May Stevenson in a letter beginning: 'Diir Frind' but May replied that she could 'si meni inkanviiniensis az vel az difikylties'. That stopped it.

The perfect embodiment of the courtier-poet was a heroic nobleman born in one of the great houses of England, Penshurst Place, in 1554, and dead a mere thirty-one years later on a battlefield fighting the Spanish in the Netherlands: Sir Philip Sidney. He achieved lasting fame for giving his water bottle to another wounded soldier with the words "Thy need is greater than mine.

What happened to English after the Battle of Ethandune was that it not only endured, it thrived, it grew. Having held steady under fire, it moved forward. The two principal reasons for this were Alfred himself and what seems to me to be the profoundly self-preserving nature of the language which had so slowly and doggedly alchemised into English.

because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer, more explicit language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated." He went even further: "The language, too

Sheridan hit the nerve. In one of his lectures, in 1762, he wrote: "Pronunciation . . . is a sort of proof that a person has kept good company, and on that account is sought after by all, who wish to be considered as fashionable people or members of the beau monde." He took no prisoners. "All other dialects are sure marks, either of a provincial, rustic, pedantic or mechanic education; and therefore have some degree of disgrace annexed to them.

But English was at the heart of it. As far as we know, Richard II is the first recorded example of a monarch using only English since the Conquest. And he reached for it when he was within a few minutes of seeing his kingdom transformed utterly.

Hindsight is the easy way to mop up the mess which we call history; it is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled.

Before the fifteenth century was out, William Caxton had printed two editions of The Canterbury Tales and they have never been out of print since. They have been enjoyed, imitated, copied, re-translated, put on stage, screen and radio, and generations have rightly regarded Chaucer as the father and founding genius of English literature.

One way to destroy a personality is to cut out memory: one way to destroy a state is to cut out its history. Especially when that history comes out of the native language. Status is gone; continuity is disconnected;

Thou art a monument without a tomb And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give.

Fart: to break wind behind. As when we gun discharge Although the bore be ne'er so large Before the flame the muzzle burst Just at the breech it flashes first; So from my lord his passion broke, He farted first and then he spoke.

Sir William's work shows, I think, the great respect the small intruding country had at that time for the awesome mass of a subcontinent of which it was edging into control.

We are, each one of us, all talking advertisements for our history. Accent is the snake and the ladder in the upstairs downstairs of social ambition. Accent is the con man's first resource.

anhydrohepseterion" (a machine for stewing potatoes in their own juice).

Yet in its life, for eight hundred years, virtue alone, that one word, has illuminated and explained something of what we think we are, it has enriched our description of ourselves, uncovered yet more of the human condition which seems to crave infinite description. It is not just a word but a little history of our thought and actions. Virtue might or might not be its own reward. It was certainly ours.

There were over five hundred ways of spelling the word 'through' and over sixty of the pronoun 'she', which is quite hard to imagine.

As when we gun discharge Although the bore be ne'er so large Before the flame the muzzle burst Just at the breech it flashes first; So from my lord his passion broke, He farted first and then he spoke. [Swift]

Wycliffe's remains were burned on a little bridge that spanned the River Swift, which was a tributary of the Avon. His ashes were thrown into the stream. Soon afterwards a Lollard prophecy appeared: The Avon to the Severn runs, The Severn to the sea. And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad Wide as the waters be. In English.

Estuary English creeps in and shows no sign of ebbing.

English, like water, will find its own level. The language itself through usage and natural selection will see that what is survivable will survive.

Shakespeare shoved into bed together words that scarcely knew each other before, had never even been introduced.