Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer

"Yes, there’s the blue one, which I’ve got here and there’s a later one, with a red cover. They’re both fantastic. It is the Bible because it has all the conjugations of the verbs and the declensions of the nouns. It also has, in very concise form, practically all the rules of grammar and syntax. It’s a very dry book. You’re not going to find any jokes in it, but absolutely everything is there. It’s the ultimate rulebook of Latin. It’s actually very short. It’s a very thin volume, because there’s no excess verbiage at all. It’s amazing. Kennedy was, I think, a Latin master in Liverpool. My father told me that because every year whole new generations of school children bought the book, the borders of Lake Geneva were filled with huge villas lived in by people like Kennedy, Hillard and Botting — all these people who wrote Latin grammar books before it had this great decline. They became, very early on, standard books, because they were beautifully worked out to be extremely efficient in the delivery of information. Kennedy is very concise, but it has the answer to every problem in Latin in it. It doesn’t go that far, but I’ve written seven books and six of them have sold two copies. The only one that sold at all well was this one. I could probably have bought, not a villa, but a very, very small flat on the outskirts of London on the proceeds. There’s an incredible appetite. There’s a great Philip Larkin poem called, “Church Going,” about what will happen to churches when no one goes to them anymore and they fall apart and we all become secular and atheist. He imagines people going, in the future, to these rundown churches and still trying to find the altar and touching various holy stones. He thinks of himself as an agnostic, I think, but he says that there is a hunger for seriousness in all of us. I think there really is. Latin and Greek and an awful lot of difficult things were thrown out of most British schools in the 50s and 60s, but that hunger still survives. I think that’s why Amo, Amas, Amat did well, although it’s delivered in a jokey way. There are an awful lot of parents who learned Latin and Greek who are concerned that their children no longer are. Even if they hated it, they have a memory of this serious and difficult subject. It is difficult to learn properly, but I do think people patronize children. Perhaps not all, but a lot of children quite like difficulty. It’s also the one time—I don’t know about you, but when I was a small boy, I did things dutifully—when if you’re asked to learn 100 pages of vocab, you go and do it. I wouldn’t do it now, but as a little boy I would. That’s the time to force the mind full of these things. There’s no two ways about it, it’s quite boring, but the pleasure that comes from having learnt all this is enormous."