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Join the Just a Minute star, bestselling author, and English language virtuoso Gyles Brandreth for a hilarious tour of the English language – with absolutely no hesitation, repetition, or deviation.

Gyles Brandreth has been delighting listeners of Radio 4 with verbal fireworks since his first appearance on Just a Minute in 1981. Now he joins How To Academy to put us through our paces, offering a whirlwind trip through the English language: from the origins of words and phrases, to correct grammar and punctuation, from similes and euphemisms to record-breaking tongue twisters.

If you want to know what bungalows have to do with Bengal, how English came to be the most spoken language in the world (and one of the biggest, with over half a million words), what on earth Victorian opium addict Thomas de Quincy was up to when he ‘apricated himself in the occasional moonbeams’, and what the salty parrot said to his new owner when he got home from the pet shop, this live event is an unmissable, one-of-a-kind treat.