I’ve been reading a most interesting book.
I’ve been reading a most interesting book. It’s all about the books Gladstone read, the way he read them and what he did with the 30,000 books he collected in his long life.
Most of the book is written engagingly enough. ‘Until the late 19th century, most books were published without an index, obliging the assiduous reader [like Gladstone] to complete their own.’ That is a clear sentence, even if its use of the plural pronoun their as a gender-neutral singular might annoy some. But the introduction uses an entirely different kind of language, a baffling thicket of unsignalled conjunctions and disjunctions, of clotted noun phrases, and heaped up jargon.
‘There remains important work to be done regarding the representation and reception of Gladstone in a variety of spheres,’ we are told. ‘That a figure who was both so personally eclectic and who operated as such a multifaceted cultural icon within his society should not have been reassessed from such perspectives is surprising.’
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