Henry Hitchings is an author specializing in language and cultural history. In 2005 he published "Defining the World," which told the story of Dr Johnson's Dictionary and won the MLA's prize for the best book by an independent scholar that year. In 2008 he followed this with "The Secret Life of Words," for which he won a Somerset Maugham Award. His most recent book is "The Language Wars." Subtitled"A History of Proper English," it has just been published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He lives in London, where he is the theatre critic for the Evening Standard.