Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’

When the library of V. S. Pritchett was sold off after his death some years ago, I bought a few books as a mark of homage, among them H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I’d possessed other copies, but this was a first edition, and while I was thumbing it idly one day I noticed that it was published in 1926. I then also noticed that The King’s English, which he wrote with his brother F. W. Fowler, was published in 1906, and these anniversaries seem to have passed unnoticed.

A hundred years on, and eighty years on, have there been more useful and influential books of their kind in our time? Fowler was a great lexicographer, but he was also the founding father of the language column, and patron saint to all of us who are concerned — sometimes to the point of obsession — with the wayward or faulty use of language.