Product Description

Have you ever found yourself irritated when a sine qua non or
a mea culpa is thrown into the conversation by a particularly annoying
person? Or do distant memories of afternoons spent struggling to learn
obscure verbs fill you with dread?
Never fear! (or as a Latin show-off might say, Nil Desperandum!)
In this delightful guided tour of Latin, which features everything from a
Monty Python grammar lesson to David Beckham's tattoos and all the best
snippets of prose and poetry from 2000 years of literary history, Harry
Mount wipes the dust off those boring primers and breathes life back into
the greatest language of them all.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15312 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-02
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English, Latin
• Binding: Hardcover
• 269 pages

About the Author
Harry Mount read Classics at Oxford and was a Latin tutor before becoming a journalist. He has been a leader-writer and New York correspondent at the Daily Telegraph. His memoir of his time as a barrister's pupil, My Brief Career, is also published by Short Books

Customer Reviews

Thoroughly entertaining
I was very surprised to see some of the negative reviews that this book has received here. I am a recently qualified Latin teacher, and I have recent experience of Latin from both sides of the teacher / student divide. I found the book to be thoroughly entertaining and informative, occasionally downright hilarious, and it consistently held my attention.

I think the discrepancies in the reviews above are largely due to people's misguided expectations of the book. It is not (nor could it possibly be used as) a reference work by which one could expect to learn the language. Its audience is probably limited to those who already have a reasonable knowledge of Latin, and, put simply, the author aims to reward your knowledge (no matter how basic) with some clever 'in jokes' and literary references. He does so, in my opinion, with a good deal of skill and success.

Bene
I couldn't believe I would enjoy a book based on the latin language and how it might affect the way I go about my life, but having been given a copy of Amo, Amas, Amat I could not put it down. Not only is it written with great wit and intelligence, but it really makes understanding Latin easy in a way I could never have believed possible when it was taught to me at school. Thank you, Harry Mount, for finally bringing Latin to life for me.

Confusing
While this book amounts on one level to a light-hearted but informative take on Latin, its learning and its relentless demise in British schools, the (rather angry) final chapter left me confused as to what the author was actually trying to do.

As might be expected from a person of Harry Mount's standing, there is much humour in this piece; indeed, at times, the jocular tone and somewhat self-conscious attempts to jemmy in a joke at all costs serve to interrupt the flow and can become a smidge irritating and make the author seem a little too pleased with himself.

However, the final chapter, with its rather spiteful attack on modern textbooks and methods, sits rather uneasily with the tone of the rest of the book and gives the impression, rightly or wrongly, that Mount's intention was rather more serious than he might originally have implied. All in all, a rather confusing conclusion to a book which is certainly well worth reading by anyone who remembers those dark times of learning Latin declensions and cases by rote.