"There are too many words around to be able to say anything anymore. Censorship used to be the issue. Gagging. Now it's the spuming word geysers of social media, the non-stop jabber of reality show politicians (of which Trump is just the US example), who have occupied all language, so there is no more space for the self or for dissent. One way out is silence. Another is to reinvent how we use words, how we care for them, how we make them and them us. This short sharp book opens the conversation." (Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible) "This is a correctly political Lingua Tertii Imperii for our age.

In times when the war is the words the humanities bring super-vision, this book of obedient linguistic disobedience will give you a road map--no, not a road map, let's not speak any more of road maps--it will give you a way, when there is no path, a tracery of steps taken through the mouthways of words. There will be an attentiveness awoken in your word-making tongue, as you read these disobediently obedient words, you will crave silence, as a political duty, a spiritual act." (Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts, University of Glasgow, UK).