Tom Shippey writes:

Orme explains what is known of curricula and textbooks, of schoolroom layouts, of endowments and statutes and much else, but the life of his book comes very often from carefully collected low-grade materials, accidental survivals from the schoolroom. One traditional way of teaching was by latinitates and vulgaria, the former a Latin sentence set as an exercise, the latter its English equivalent. One sees teaching of this sort, for instance, in M.R. James’s ‘A School Story’. The master has set the boys the exercise of writing a Latin sentence using a form of the verb meminisse, ‘to remember’, and most of them duly write howlers like meminiscimus patri meo (the joke falls flat now, but would have raised a laugh for a thousand years). But one boy, McLeod, second-sighted like so many Highlanders, for some reason finds himself writing ‘Memento putei inter quatuor taxos,’ ‘remember the well between the four yews,’ which is good Latin but has alarming and spooky consequences.

(LRB 22 February 2007)

Yale | hardback 430 pp. |ISBN: 9780300111026