Harry Mount is getting some big time press attention ... this time, from the Guardian:

It is a thoroughly unlikely publishing phenomenon. A book about Latin - that is, about how to learn Latin, with dozens of verb tables and explanations of the ablative absolute and the gerundive - has crept up, unexpectedly but persistently, as high as number 14 in the Amazon bestseller list in the all-important weeks before Christmas. It is possible that the British reading public are labouring under an almighty illusion, since Amo, Amas, Amat ... and All That: How to Become a Latin Lover might reasonably be supposed to be a volume dispensing Roman sex tips (which would be a pretty racy read). But that must just be me, for a glance at the relevant Amazon page shows that "customers who bought this item also bought Revised Latin Primer by BH Kennedy" (ghastly bane of posh English schoolchildren since, quite possibly, the defeat of Boudicca).

Mehercule! As you almost certainly wouldn't exclaim. It's true: there are people out there masochistic enough to put themselves through the passive periphrastic and hic, haec, hoc

A clue to a reason for the success of Amo, Amas, Amat is also provided by Amazon, which has nominated as the volume's "perfect partner" Beyond Words, John Humphrys' cross book about the use of English in today's degenerate world. In other words, Amo, Amas, Amat is, broadly, part of the Eats, Shoots and Leaves phenomenon and thus falls into the category of books that are ostensibly cris de coeur for the correct use of the apostrophe, say, while really, deep down, betraying a sort of posh anxiety about standards in society generally.

So, we may mourn the fact that our streets are thronged with Asbo-wielding, infra dig1 (see footnotes), Burberry-wearing youths who have lost all sense of "respect". But fear not, for Lynne Truss's beleaguered army of careful-English writers, aided by a squad of cut-throat guerrilla fighters led by Humphrys, has suddenly been relieved by crack reinforcements from the Roman cavalry . . . et cetera, ad nauseam2

The author of this surprise hit is Harry Mount, Oxford classics graduate and, until a recent purge of foreign correspondents by the paper, the Daily Telegraph's man in New York. He is possibly more taken aback than anyone about the runaway success of his book and hypothesises over the phone from the US that it's because "people more and more long to hold on to serious things, and old things".

His book is a paradoxical hit because it's not as if Latin is enjoying a revival - instead, it seems inexorably on the decline. Now, as Mount points out, you don't need to have done Latin at school (let alone Greek) to study it at Oxford, by tradition the brainiest place in the country, if not the world, to read classics. Indeed, his book is evidence of Latin's death throes: if it was still thriving in schools we wouldn't need his book to remind us of it.

Amo, Amas, Amat, however, is about pleasure as much as anything else. What Mount purports to give you is Latin without the pain (indeed, he suggests buying Kennedy if you want a "proper" hair-shirt grammar book to consult). He likens his undertaking to JG Links's marvellous book Venice for Pleasure - a fabulously old-fartish tourist guide that suggests tackling the city in the most sybaritic way possible, with many a stop for coffee and ice cream and no guilt if you can't face millions of Tintorettos in the Accademia.

In Mount's book, the equivalent of the millions of Tintorettos are the verb tables and the explanations of how to form various tricky Latin constructions. These tables, it must be said, go on for ever - even the enthusiastic Mount apologetically describes the adjectives as "pretty relentless". According to temperament, they will provide for former school or university Latinists either an inspiring reminder of how much knowledge youthful heads once held; or a depressing memento mori3, inviting one to contemplate faulty memory, the passage of time, and the destruction of precious brain cells. Unless you are a seriously persistent student, it is much easier to skip all that, settle in a notional Venetian cafe, and read the surrounding stuff, which meanders from reminiscences about Mount's Latin masters at school, to a funny-and-useful guide to Latin phrases in regular English use, concluding with a call to arms for proper classics teaching in schools.

The Latin masters of Mount's memory, by the way, are pure Molesworth meets Mr Chips with a pinch of The History Boys. He also makes reference to a modern equivalent, 25-year-old Miss Howard-Johnston, who, if he hasn't made her up for effect, works at a comprehensive in the Elephant and Castle in London, "has a fetching line in scrunched-up hair and boho jangly jewellery" and "teaches Latin by rapping in the language". No, really. Her pupils call her "Miss Ho-Jo".

I speak to a more realistic version of the modern Latin schoolteacher, Rebecca Leek, who teaches part-time "in a rather nice girls' private school in Letchworth Garden City". In year nine the girls can opt for Latin lessons in their lunch hour and by year 10 they can choose to do it for GCSE. She has 14 in her current GCSE group - not a bad number at all. Even for these girls, there is a hint of nostalgia in the exercise. "Parents who did it a bit at school are particulary keen. There's a cachet attached to it, a sort of romanticism," she says.

Mount's starting point in Amo, Amas, Amat is that Latin gives its invoker a touch of class. That is why, out of David Beckham's nine tattoos, three are in Latin, including one neatly demonstrating the correct use of ut plus the subjuntive to indicate purpose (ut amem et foveam, that I might love and cherish). So not only (and most importantly) is learning Latin a sine qua non4 for reading some of the best literature ever produced, it also has useful applications for show-offs.

As a caveat5, however, he introduces a notion supplied by Kingsley Amis's The King's English: A Guide To Modern Usage, which describes "prissy, fussy, priggish" linguistic pedants as Wankers. There are a lot of Wankers in the modern Latin-reading world, warns Mount. As an example of Wankerishness, Mount invokes a Spectator magazine review by Chris Patten in which he describes historian Colin Lucas as "Balliol's quondam Master".

Mount violently objects to the use of a Latin word where a perfectly good English one will do, but applauds the use of the phrase pari passu7 in a Daily Telegraph leader.

Pari passu seems much more Wankerish to me. Poor old Mount seems a bit sheepish about all this when we speak. "It is appalling to show off, really," he says, "and dreadful to use Latin phrases when you know you won't be understood. OK, I am probably a bit of a wanker."

Aside from the dubious show-off value, what is good about knowing Latin? Leek thinks its study is terrific for her students. "These days, what you are asked in exams is very clear," she says. "GCSEs cannot go outside the box of what is expressly put down in the syllabus. But Latin is about being thrown a passage you have never seen before and being asked to decode it - there's still much more risk attached than there is with other subjects. Even the really clever ones come up against something they just can't do immediately, something that's really tricky. And it's good for them."

Then there's the literature. "You read Virgil at GCSE level, but with French and German you don't read literature until A-level. So even at GCSE, pupils become mini-classicists. It's got it all, really. It gives them a better English vocabulary, it helps them read English, especially English poetry, more analytically, because they are used to close study of passages, and then you are reading Virgil - really hardcore literature."

Both Leek and Mount also talk about the historical value of knowing Latin."It allows you to slip the modern skin off everything from language to government systems and see the Roman bones of it," Mount says.

According to Leek: "The Romans provide a useful palate to start thinking about empire- making, about the way we treat different societies or handle different mores8. The more you read about current affairs, the more you come back to analogies with the history of the late Roman republic and early empire." She reserves special disdain for the Cambridge Latin Course, the series of books now most widely used in schools and widely blamed for Latin's "dumbing down" and indeed decline. "It's a complete nightmare. I refuse to use it," says Leek.

I suppose Latin coursebooks have always been dreadful in their way. For the older generation, there was "The Romans are attacking the ditch with arrows" school of dreariness. For my peers, learning in the 1980s, there was an execrable textbook called Ecce Romani (deliciously translated by Mount in his book as Yo! Romans), of which I remember little except boredom.

As a novice, could you learn Latin from Mount's book? I suspect it is really more of a companion volume for people who are learning formally anyway, or for nostalgics who studied at school or university. Like a loquacious teacher easily distracted from the task in hand, Mount is too ready to digress entertainingly on the use of Latin in PG Wodehouse or Monty Python to get a student going on all the horrific slog-work of declensions and conjugations necessary before you climb to the sunlit plateaux where you can read a passage of Virgil with relative ease.

In the end, though, as that great philosopher Molesworth puts it: "Actually it is quite easy to be topp in lat. you just have to work chiz chiz chiz."

Footnotes

1 From infra dignitatem: beneath one's dignity.
2 Et cetera: literally, and the other things. Ad nauseam: literally, until sickness.
3 Memento mori: a reminder of death. Often misspelled as momento.
4 Sine qua non: without which not; in other words, a necessary condition.
5 Caveat: a warning. Literally, let him/her beware.
6 Quondam: former
7 Pari passu: with equal step. "Used to describe two enterprises being treated in the same way," explains Mount.
8 Mores: nominative plural of mos (custom, habit, fashion). "O tempora, o mores!" - Oh the times, the morals! (Cicero, First Catilinarian).

Bloglossalia:

David Parsons comments on the elitist tone of the above at ARLT ...