The Collected Papers of Henry Bradley

"It’s all sorts of things. James Murray had written books before he became the editor of the OED, he wrote an important book on Scottish dialect, for example. But once he became editor of the OED, that was what he did. He didn’t really have time for anything else. Somehow Bradley, while he was working on the OED, continued to produce scholarly articles on place names and solving problems in old texts. He wrote articles for the Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and several books, like a popular history of English called The Making of English. These collected papers contain some of those journal articles. But the reason I’ve chosen it is because it begins with a memoir of Henry Bradley. It tells the story of his life and it’s by the poet laureate Robert Bridges, who was a great friend. Just by looking at it really hard. I suppose his reading enabled him to pick up little details. I mean, he wasn’t the only reviewer of the first fascicle of the dictionary to spot mistakes. It wasn’t that he found lots and lots of mistakes. It was just the way he wrote about them. He showed himself to be very perceptive."