Henry Hitchings FRSL (born 11 December 1974) is an author, reviewer and critic, specializing in narrative non-fiction, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural history.
[8] In the United States, Defining the World won the Modern Language Association's prize for the best work by an independent scholar in 2005.
[11] Instead of using history to explain language, Hitchings "picks words apart to find their origins" and then molds this "mountain of dense information into an elegant narrative".
[16] In March 2009, on the strength of The Secret Life of Words, Hitchings was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.
[21] It is "a detailed narrative of the attempts ... to make rules about how we speak and write"[22] and "a historical guide to the sometimes splenetic battles that have been fought over English down the centuries".
[23] Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore, after praising the book as "crisply written, amusing, informative and thought-provoking", commented that "it is an agony not to be able to use English properly.
Its contributors included Alaa Al Aswany, Stefano Benni, Michael Dirda, Daniel Kehlmann, Andrey Kurkov, Yiyun Li, Pankaj Mishra, Dorthe Nors, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Ian Sansom, Elif Shafak, Iain Sinclair, Ali Smith, Sasa Stanisic and Juan Gabriel Vasquez.
[28] Jane Darcy, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, explained that "The book’s subtitle, Dr Johnson’s Guide to Life, may evoke that popular sub-genre of self-help books which co-opt historical celebrities to present tips for the modern world, but Hitchings, like his favourite author, has a serious moral purpose.
Despite his often breezily demotic tone, he is deeply attuned to Johnson’s melancholy, tracing its presence throughout his adult life and its influence on his thinking about pain and suffering", and commented that "Hitchings inevitably revisits familiar places and favourite quotations.