The Adventure of English - Melvyn Bragg

Published in flipback format by Hodder & Stoughton: London, UK, 2011.
First published 2003.

A book marketed right at me, seemingly, The Adventure of English is a history of the English language, from around 500 AD through til just after the year 2000. The subtitle is The Biography of a Language, and this feels fairly accurate: the focus is always on the language itself, and how the various influences of history has shaped it; events come and go within the pages only as needed for explanation.

As a result, we get chapters on figures like Chaucer and Shakespeare, chapters on areas where specific branches of English have developed - such as USA, India and Australia - and even a few chapters devoted to Church History figures like Wycliffe and Tyndale, and their efforts to translate the Bible into English.

It's all fascinating - far more than it might at first appear. Although the book eventually dragged on a bit (understandable, as it is covering almost 2000 years of history in a single volume), I never lost interest in what I was reading. Parts of the Church History influence even made it into some of my sermons!

The only thing I found a little tricky about the book was the format. This particular edition was written in 'flipback' format, which opens like a flipbook, or desk-calendar: you turn each page from bottom to top, rather than from right to left. With the book being smaller, this wasn't too much of an issue, but it did force me to rethink how I held the book. Also, at times (and I'm assuming this might be more format related than anything else), quotes that Bragg was including flowed straight into and out of the main text without clear differentiation, or even (always) a clear paragraph break. This meant there were moments when I had to carefully note where a quote started or stopped, and this took me out of the reading 'flow' for a moment.

All in all, though, I enjoyed this a lot.

Still, I'm happy its finished now.

Completed 19 July 2025.

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