Georges Barbier’s imaginative illustration of an opium den c. 1921as ‘the drug is both a tremendous force for
good and an indescribable evil’ — which, if
true, is a shame, because it would be a decent
idea to try to describe it. In fact, Inglis is
throughout rather unattractively moralistic
about her subject. She describes Coleridge
‘misusing’ laudanum, as if the poor sap had
been in the habit of pouring it over his head,
and endorses Southey’s criticism of the
greater man’s ‘indulgence’. Coleridge died
‘an unhappy addict’, Inglis concludes with
satisfaction, though it bears pointing out that
he had written some rather good poetry and
criticism along the way. She also describes
the long life of the great De Quincey as
‘riven by disputes, nightmares, debt and drug
dependence’, which again is rather to miss
the literary point.
For an investigation into why people use
opium and other substances recreationally in
the first place, one must look elsewhere —
for example to Richard J. Miller’s excellent
Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind
Psychotropic Drugs. Inglis, for her part, just
seems consistently baffled as to why any-
one might want to get off their face. She is
still surprised when relating how Hunter
S. Thompson had ‘few regrets’ about his
pharmacological adventures; but a line of his
explains something about the attraction of
altered states of mind that these 400 pages
otherwise cannot. ‘I hate to advocate drugs,
alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone,’
Thompson is supposed to have said, ‘but
they’ve always worked for me.’
Think before you write
Daniel Hahn
First You Write a Sentence:
The Elements of Reading, Writing...
and Life
by Joe Moran
Viking, £14.99, pp. 256Talk on the Wild Side: The
Untameable Nature of Language
by Lane Greene
Profile, £14.99, pp. 223The Secret Life of Language
by Simon Pulleyn
Cassell, £12.99, pp. 192This is a sentence. As is this — not an excep-
tionally beautiful one, but a sentence all
the same, just telling you what it needs to
tell you, just getting on with things, doing
its job. Sentences are everyday, functional
things, ubiquitous and unappreciated. And
Joe Moran thinks it’s about time we started
noticing them.
First You Write a Sentence is an often
impassioned attempt to get us to take sen-
tences seriously. Moran is interested in
how they work — in how written language
works, in construction and effect — and
in sentences’ function as carefully assem-
bled units of communication. That ‘care-
fully’ is especially important. Sentences areeverywhere, formed without much atten-
tion and used without much thought, but
Moran wants to encourage an alertness to
their construction.
Some of the book’s most compelling
sections seem indeed to be about this very
thing: not about nouns and verbs, or mono-
syllables and vowel sounds, but about care.
Moran is advocating attentiveness, delib-
erateness, absorbedness, slow and studied
craft, pushing against ‘the glib articulacy
of a distracted age’. Sentences are — they
should be — ‘a gift’. Clarity is important,
but this doesn’t mean characterlessness,
or charmlessness.
There’s plenty in Moran’s book to delight
grammar and language nerds, too, of course.
He argues eloquently for fresh metaphors,
and for monosyllables, especially when used
by Tyndale. He rhapsodises on the pleasures
of a long sentence expertly unspooled. And
he wants more subjunctives, fewer conjunc-
tive adverbs, and much less schwa. Oh, and
nominalisations are very bad, too! (Good
tip: always avoid an excess of nouniness.) He
champions verbs, while encouraging only
sparing use of ‘to be’ and the passive voice.
But — crucially — this argument is not
made dogmatically, because there is a right
time for nouns and for the passive voice and
for polysyllables (‘this argument is not made
dogmatically’), and for breaking any rules
that need to be broken, because what really
matters is that you think about what you’re
doing, and you don’t make your sentencesBRIDGEMAN IMAGES