Philip Gooden taught English for many years. His non-fiction books include literature guides for students, popular reference titles Who’s Whose: A No-Nonsense Guide to Easily Confused Words, Faux Pas: A No-Nonsense Guide to Words and Phrases from Other Languages, Name Dropping: An A to Z Guide to the Use of Names in Everyday Language, Idiomantics: The Weird World of Popular Phrases, The Word at War: World War Two in 100 Phrases and Skyscrapers, Hemlines and the Eddie Murphy Rule: Life’s Hidden Laws, Rules and Theories for Bloomsbury.
The Story of English: How the English Language Conquered the World was published by Quercus. Philip’s book for Head of Zeus is called called May We Borrow Your Language? How English has stolen, snaffled, purloined, pilfered, appropriated and looted words from all four corners of the world . More recently Little Brown published another fascinating book about language entitled Bad Words and what they say about us.
Philip also writes fiction and is the author of the Nick Revill series, a sequence of six historical mysteries set in Elizabethan and Jacobean London during the time of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre which was re-released in 2020 by Constable Robinson. In addition he has written a crime series set in Chaucer’s time and new editions were published in 2020. He also writes 19th century mysteries, most recently The Salisbury Papers, The Durham Deception and The Ely Testament, published in 2021. He is a member of the Medieval Murderers group who together have written some ten titles for Simon & Schuster.
Philip was recently commissioned by Sweet Cherry to adapt ten of Dickens’ novels for children.
The Word at War was featured in Gary Nunn’s Mind Your Language blog: http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/sep/26/mind-your-language-war-words
Philip Gooden and Peter Lewis talk about Idiomantics Youtube clip. See here
The Coffee Pot Book Club: Join me in conversation with Historical Fiction author, Philip Gooden
Stream Shadowing Bond, by Philip Gooden by The Book Collector | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
