Reference

While most people agree that clichés are to be avoided, there is no general agreement on what is and what is not a cliché. For the lexicographer Orin Hargraves they are 'the sterile offspring of a mind that is not engaged in creativity', and by analysing hundreds of examples he presents a thorough guide to identifying tired, overused phrases that prompts us to examine how we express our ideas and to construct our speech and writing thoughtfully.

Drawing on sources from court records to tweets, this entertaining history shows how slang has flourished in English for centuries and provides a fascinating perspective on social and political change.

This is the first printed supplement to the Oxford DNB (2004) and includes entries on 819 men and women who shaped recent British history and who died between 2001 and 2004. The earliest person by birth date is the dancer and choreographer Dame Ninette de Valois (1898–2001), but the majority of subjects grew up in the interwar years. Among the notable figures in this supplement are Barbara Castle, John Peel, Francis Crick and Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. No jacket.

You will need a fairly large pocket, because this is a substantial Italian/English, English/Italian dictionary, designed to meet the needs of students, tourists and anyone in need of quick and reliable translations, with the focus on everyday, idiomatic English and Italian. In addition to the main listings, this edition has an A–Z of Italian life and culture and notes on letter-writing, text messaging and online navigation in Italian.

Beginning with 'From swelt to zonk: words for dying', this book follows the semantic development of words in timelines for each of 15 topics, using an extraordinary linguistic tool: The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Focusing on arcane and curious aspects of language, Blake's intriguing book 'explores the reasons for obscurity and secrecy, and touches on some of the fascinating beliefs that underlie the constraints on using language freely'. He begins with word games and the former uses of anagrams and palindromes, then discusses topics including riddles, ciphers and codes, secret language in the Bible, allusion, and the 'everyday oblique' such as euphemism and oxymora.