Forsyth, Mark – The Bell Bookshop

Rhyme and Reason

Emma — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

‘Enchanting’ Stephen FrySome people worry that they don’t appreciate poetry; but English poetry wasn’t written to be appreciated it was written to be enjoyed. For six centuries people have been reading poetry for enjoyment – for fun, for romance, for religion and for entertainment – and this is a book about those people.What was it like to be sent a Tudor love sonnet? And how did you reply? What did people think of Wordsworth or Chaucer before they were put on pedestals? What was it like to read poetry back in the days when you didn’t have to write an essay on it afterwards?Rhyme and Reason takes you from a medieval accountant (called Chaucer) trying to entertain his lord, past a doomed love affair in the Tower of London, through adoring sonnets and notebooks filled with dirty poems, through Byromania and the Victorian hearth, understanding why people simply enjoyed poetry. From the poems of housemaids to the rhymes of kings it’s the history of Britain through the poems that people read, recited and loved.In this book, you will discover:Lord Byron sold more books in a day than Jane Austen did in her lifetime.If Louis XVI had been as keen on governing France as he was on English poetry, he might have kept his head.During the First World War there were more women poets published than soldier poets.The greatest fraud in literary history (and why you’ve never heard of it)How to have fun at a seventeenth century hangingHow to really annoy Henry VIII (either with a fart joke, or with true love)How a kitchen-maid became one of the most popular poets of the 18th CenturyWhat Byron really thought of ‘Johnny Keats’s piss-a-bed poetry’Why the Globe Theatre was more than twice the size of Wembley Stadium

A riddle for a king

Emma — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Philo longs for freedom and adventure, and he most certainly gets it when he lands in the strangest of lands: a place where nothing makes sense, a place packed with riddles and paradoxes. Will Philo ever make it home? Will he make sense of the conundrums that litter his path? An addictive, delightfully bamboozling story sure to thrill and intrigue puzzle-loving readers.

The Illustrated Etymologicon

Emma — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

**THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER**

‘Witty and erudite … stuffed with the kind of arcane information that nobody strictly needs to know, but which is a pleasure to learn nonetheless.’ Nick Duerden, Independent.

‘Particularly good … Forsyth takes words and draws us into their, and our, murky history.’ William Leith, Evening Standard.

The Etymologicon is an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language.

What is the actual connection between disgruntled and gruntled? What links church organs to organised crime, California to the Caliphate, or brackets to codpieces?

Mark Forsyth’s riotous celebration of the idiosyncratic and sometimes absurd connections between words is a classic of its kind: a mine of fascinating information and a must-read for word-lovers everywhere.

‘Highly recommended’ Spectator.