Bibliofile

Incidentally, Midnight’s Children was recently voted one of Britain’s all-time favourite books. The list is drawn from a readers’ poll by the bbc, which will whittle it down to the top 20 and declare an overall winner sometime this autumn. Other books which figured in the top 100 list were Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. The iwe trinity figures in a list that includes Tolstoy, Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But the list drawn up from 7,000 titles nominated by 140,000 readers also includes the likes of Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Jean M. Aeul’s The Clan of the Cave Bear, Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree and A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh.

A perennial classic that never stops evolving is celebrating a milestone. Seventy-five years ago, on June 6, 1928, the Oxford English Dictionary containing over 400,000 words in 10 volumes was finally completed. The original editor, James Murray, who thought it would take five years to complete the project (they got as far as "ant" in five years!) died without seeing his life’s work done. But work on OED never ends, growing and changing as cultures across the world claim English as a mother tongue. At over 60 million words, it is still attempting to keep pace with the growth of English language.