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I am a research student, and read a blog of your in 2014 about ‘Lessons from John Buchan for Today’ complaining of the ‘need for an old Oxford Dictionary, a biblical and classical reference work every few pages.’ I can’t now find it on the net. Please can you give me the date so that I can reference it? Many thanks, David Weekes
Many thanks for this David. When my website switched hosts and software all content should have transferred over but some specific pages and documents appear to have got lost in transition. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll send you the date and file (& add it again here). Good luck in your research and writing. By the way, I do wonder if the big words, biblical and classical references in much Victorian / Edwardian writing were because more people had a full classical and official Anglican Christian education then. It’s like when I read untranslated Latin phrases in books, and in Law reports (usually) before the 1970s and especially Victorian / first half of 20th C, I wonder if it was assumed that barristers and the ‘educated’ knew the quotes, or could translate them. Or was it elitist and excluding people even then? When I’m volunteering in Ukraine students often ask me what words mean in the 20th or 19th C English literature they are studying and they are very surprised when I often say that I don’t know. But then this is the linguistic and translation students and they are good at learning words.