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“... civil servant who felt that bureaucrats should learn to write like human beings. Sir Ernest Gowers’s Plain Words (1948) and The ABC of Plain Words (1951) jointly became The Complete Plain Words (1954), continuing happily into a second edition (1973) under the urbane guardianship of Sir Bruce Fraser; and here it is afresh, deftly ...”

“... courteous to what he sees in Britain as ‘such respected scholar-shamans as H.W. Fowler and Sir Ernest Gowers’. The ‘American species’ are to be exposed for their élitism, their antipathy to minorities, their horror of change, and (of course) their gross inconsistency, itself born of ignorance and prejudice. But Bolinger just as rightly ...”

“... now 41. He moved to London, where he scratched a living writing pieces, ‘and attempted’, in Ernest Gowers’s words, ‘to demonstrate what he had always maintained to be true – that a man ought to be able to live on £100 a year’. In 1903 he moved to Guernsey and began working with his brother Francis Fowler, to whom Modern English Usage is ...”

“... to the National Trust. Dalton’s successor, Sir Stafford Cripps, appointed a committee under Sir Ernest Gowers, which in 1950 declared that ‘the English country house is the greatest contribution made by England to the visual arts ... and has seldom, if ever, been equalled in the history of civilisation.’ Instead of more public ownership and ...”

“... to avoid such circumlocution by a pamphlet called ‘Plain Words’ which Churchill asked Sir Ernest Gowers to write in order to teach civil servants better style. Medawar chides scientists for putting off the hard task of writing up their research, but he overlooks the real reason for their stalling, which is that before the results have been ...”

“... they are even more intimidating as a priesthood than were such old mandarins as the Fowlers or Gowers. For if you wanted, under the old regime (which acknowledged that it was a regime, and didn’t pretend to be a Citizen’s Advice Bureau), to know what was correct, you could look the matter up in a small book that was not technical, not dauntingly ...”