Who's Whose?: No Nonsense Guide To Easily Confused Words, A

Description:
The English language is a minefield, full of words that look alike and sound alike but mean different things. If you mistrust (or distrust?) your spellchecker and have ever been fazed (or phased?) by the difference between enquire and inquire, or complementary and complimentary, this is the perfect companion for you.

Review:
'Who's Whose: A No-Nonsense Guide to Easily Confused Words is that fairly rare thing - a genuinely useful reference book that deserves a handy place on the desk of everyone who wants to use the right word for the job.' Ian Mayes, The Guardian 'A jolly little book... A useful handbook to the booby traps that lie in wait for us all, including such old favourites as imply/infer, uninterested/ disinterested, discreet/ discrete, fazed/phased and so on.' Independent on Sunday 'For those muddled about standard English... If you ever effect instead of affect, or think bears are grisly and bones beneath the patio are grizzly, this masterly and compelling, rather than masterful and compulsive, volume is for you.' The Times 'A guide containing much good sense...uncertain users of the English language in general would best profit from the whole book.' Times Literary Supplement

Author Biography:
Philip Gooden read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then taught at secondary level for many years. In 2001 he became a full-time writer. He is the author of the Nick Revill series, a sequence of historical mysteries based in Elizabethan London and set around Shakespeare's Globe theatre. Titles so far published are Sleep of Death, Death of Kings, The Pale Companion (shortlisted for the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger award in 2002), Alms for Oblivion and Mask of Night. A contributor to various short story anthologies, Philip Gooden also works as an editor, most recently on the Mammoth Book of Literary Anecdotes and a new edition of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World for Penguin Classics. He lives in Bath where he is currently working on his next novel, An Honourable Murderer.