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Philip Gooden read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then taught at secondary school level for many years. In 2001 he became a full-time writer. Philip writes books on the English language as well as historical crime novels and mysteries. He was chairman of the Crime Writers' Association in 2007-8 and is part of the writing collective, The Medieval Murderers. He has also written the popular Who's Whose?: A No-Nonsense Guide to Easily-Confused Words, published by Bloomsbury. Peter Lewis taught German at St Anne's College, Oxford and worked as a publishing commissioning editor before becoming a freelance translator, writer and project manager. Recent translations include The Mad Science Book (Quercus) and Roman Elegy (Haus Publishing).
This eloquent pair of authors are a language lover's dream. The book captures the pugnacious parlance of wartime in all its oxymorons, its inventive acronyms, its clever rhetoric, its racy slang and its appalling euphemisms. There are surprises, too: humour, sexiness and neology: Jeep, SPAM, flak, kamikaze and mega, to name a few linguistic creations. The enduring semantic legacy, over seven decades, teaches us a lot about how we communicate in a crisis; something that's particularly pertinent today. -- Gary Nunn Guardian 'Mind your language' columnist Much of the value in this little book lies in the similarly extensive background details that Gooden and Lewis supply throughout. -- Michael Quinion World Wide Words This wonderful book defines the wartime words and phrases that still resonate in the language of peacetime. -- Iain Finlayson Saga Magazine
