Soft furnishings and split infinitives Mr N M Gwynne, as he is introduced in these two-hour talks, is a septuagenarian who used to be a successful businessman, but got fed up, and started to teach instead. He taught the children of a Silicon Valley millionaire by Skype at their "home school," and this led to other forms of "remote" teaching. One of his beliefs is that, if you are well educated in the classics, you can teach pretty much anything, and it makes you a better teacher to do so. Mr Gwynne has taught English, Latin, Greek, French, German, arithmetic, scripture, algebra and history. His youngest Latin pupil, he says, was two years old, and loved reciting "Amo, amas, amat" by heart. He also offers illustrative examples. "At Selfridges," he writes on the blackboard, "we are learning grammar, which is very unusual." If he had omitted the comma after "grammar," he points out, the meaning of the sentence would have changed: the grammar itself would be unusual, rather than the fact of learning it at Selfridges. He offers another sentence, in which the word "either" appears first as a pronoun, then as an adjective and finally as an adverb. Beside Mr Gwynne, who, in his excitement, knocks over and breaks his glass of water, and loses his spectacles among his notes, is a pile of books. "Here," he exclaims, waving one about, "is the Cambridge Latin Course - beautifully produced, but IMPOSSIBLE to learn from because all they do is encourage you to guess. And here are the only three books you need - Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer, Hillard and Botting's Elementary Latin Translation and Hillard and Botting's Elementary Latin Exercises. I promise you that I can teach people more Latin in half an hour than the Cambridge Latin Course can manage in 18 months. You can try him and see by emailing him at nmgwynne@eircom.net. You might imagine that all this is a sort of comic turn. In a way, it is. But performance is a part of all good teaching, and Mr Gwynne is perfectly serious behind it all. So, to my slight surprise, was (were?) the audience. Mr Gwynne encourages people to interrupt if they have a doubt, and many did. It was clear that they were trying to learn, and enjoying doing so. To me, though I am nearly 20 years younger than Mr Gwynne, his world is familiar from schooldays (the words "Hillard and Botting" had a Proustian power of recall). To most of those present, however, I suspect it was thrillingly exotic. Grammar has been hidden for half a century, yet it is how words work. To uncover it is like being the archaeologist of a lost world, and then discovering that the lost world is really our own world after all. Selfridges (shouldn't they bring back their apostrophe in honour of Mr Gwynne?), who tour literary festivals in search of things for their books department, sensibly realised the hidden demand for grammatical knowledge. They engaged the services of the Idler academy, which set up as a bookshop, coffee-house and informal education provider in Westbourne Park Road, London W2, last year. The Idler, in turn, produced Mr Gwynne. And Mr Gwynne has produced Gwynne's Grammar, a booklet that the Idler prints and sells. I shall leave you with what Mr Gwynne considers the perfectly accomplished grammatical sentence of the 20th century. It is by P G Wodehouse: "With the feeling, which was his constant companion nowadays, for the wedding was fixed for the fifth of July and it was already the 10th of June, that if anyone cared to describe him as some wild thing taken in a trap, which sees the trapper coming through the woods, it would be all right with him, he threw a moody banana skin at the loudest of the sparrows, and went back into the room." One comma in the wrong place, and that sentence collapses.