Dent's Modern Tribes: The Secret Languages of Britain

Sir Thomas Beecham would have agreed. His verdict on the art became notorious: ‘Try everything once, except incest and Morris dancing.’

There are few professionals in life to whom we relinquish all control. Doctors, lawyers and taxi drivers are among them, but top of the life-and-death list must surely be the commercial pilot. This is the person in whom we trust as surely as they themselves trust in the air they fly.

While today’s magicians aim to entertain, magic for their predecessors was a far weightier affair. Together with alchemy and astrology, it was held to be an essential part of an all-round education, one component of ‘grammar’ within the ‘trivium’ designed to teach the elite how to learn. Thanks to this system of learning, ‘grammar’ encompassed an e

as the novelist Jodi Picoult put it ‘The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.’

You have to drown out the white noise to get to the sounds you need.

The language of coffee belongs to Italy.

a VAT tribunal in 1991 ruled that Jaffa Cakes are exempt from VAT as they harden when stale, and are consequently cakes not biscuits.

Today things look very different, and the undertaker can draw on a lexicon as softly focused as any estate agent’s. As one wryly told me: ‘We deodorize death to within an inch of its life.’ No longer does someone die and be laid out in a coffin, or taken to a cemetery and cremated: instead they pass away or depart, are placed in a burial container,

mouseholing: blowing an entry hole in a wall of an enemy building rather than entering via a potentially booby-trapped door.