Decorum is the arbiter: the ears become “organs of grammatical fitness” and the rule that subordinates “due” to “owing” is “worth following for its own sake, not just in deference to the fact that elderly persons happen to know about it”.Are you a berk or a wanker? Under the former heading, Amis lumps those whose intruded glottal stops and grammatical solecisms suffocate English with impurity, a kind of linguistic pollution. Just as poisonous are the wankers, “prissy, fussy, priggish, prim”, who kill by hyper-precision. Kingsley’s is the via media between slipshod and punctilious, as he falls like a thunderbolt on the ersatz-posh “hyper-urbanism” of “between you and I”, on dangling participles or the abuse of “Up to a point, Lord Copper”.On pronunciation he is pragmatic, or at any rate imbued with an old man’s resignation. Girls have long since ceased to behave as gels, though “reckonise” and “seckatry” still course with unhealthy vigour Now and then he loses the point The section on “because” is delphic in its opacity.
There is no excuse for misapplying “cohort” to mean “henchman”, and “fine toothcomb”, whatever he may claim as to the availability of such an article in prewar shops, remains a hideous misrendering of “fine-toothed comb”. Such lapses merely sharpen the book’s edge as a last act of faith in uncorrupted discourse.As a teacher at the City of London School, where the boy Amis learnt his craft, I feel I have something to live up to. And if you’re the sort who jibs at that final preposition, this book is definitely for you.. It is much easier to write about the particular than the general, so all the more praise is due to May Woods for her wide-ranging Visions of Arcadia (Aurum, pounds 25). Taking on the whole of western Europe, she traces the history of a certain kind of garden making, rooted in images of an idealised past, reinterpreted through the eyes of generations of garden makers in Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo modes. It’s a vast theme and she handles it well, showing how ideas – on garden- making as well as science and philosophy – moved over boundaries.
It’s a book about design rather than plants, essential reading for anyone heading this summer towards Italian gardens such as Villa d’Este – or to less well-known gardens such as Queluz, hidden away between Lisbon and Sintra Ms Woods thinks it the greatest Rococo garden in Europe I want to go there now. Started in 1746 by the Infante Dom Pedro III and decorated with more than 200 lead statues from John Cheere’s workshop at Hyde Park Corner, it is a dreamy garden, its central canal lined with fabulous ceramic tiles.
The book is cleverly organised into chunks that are neither too big to digest nor too small to make you feel cheated of detail. The structure is chronological, moving from medieval gardens and the Renaissance to the wonderfully mad menageries, obelisks and ornamental dog kennels of the Rococo garden. “Every hovel for cows has bells hanging at the corners,” wrote Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells to The World in March 1753.Ms Woods highlights the great Renaissance contribution to garden design: the unity of structural elements in a garden. She shows how, by choosing a gardener and engineer to advise him, not an architect, Charles VIII’s French gardens never achieved the cohesion of their Italian counterparts. But what Charles lost on the vistas, he gained on the fountains. His hydraulics man, Fra Giocondo, was the best in Europe.Classical Italy is a lost continent to most of us, but its history and heroes were familiar territory to the educated garden-makers who inhabit the 350 years of May Woods’s survey.
