Henry Hitchings
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Henry Hitchings (born 11 December 1974) is an author and critic, specializing in narrative non-fiction, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural history.
He was educated at Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar (see also Old Etonians), and then read English at Christ Church, Oxford before researching his PhD, on Samuel Johnson and Sir Thomas Browne, at University College London. He has written for the Financial Times, the New Statesman, The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications, as well as making numerous radio appearances.
In 2005 he published Dr Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World [1], a biography of Samuel Johnson's epochal A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). The book is the first popular account of Johnson's magnum opus. Its American edition has the title Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson's Dictionary [2] and won the Modern Language Association's prize for the best work by an independent scholar in 2005. [3]
In 2008 Hitchings published The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, a study of loanwords, calques and their cultural significance.
This article about a writer or poet from the United Kingdom is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
