To be topp at lat., throw your Cambridge Latin Course away

The wisest words about learning Latin were said by that gifted prep-school boy, Nigel Molesworth: ‘Actually, it is quite easy to be topp in lat. You just have to work.’ But things have changed since Molesworth learnt Latin at St Custard’s in the 1950s. Over the last half-century, the work has been extracted from Latin learning and, without the work, the whole point of the language disappears.

As Gwynne’s Latin — an uplifting throwback to the good old days — reveals, many schools now don’t teach the vocative case. In the Cambridge Latin Course, used in 85 per cent of schools, you learn the nominative, accusative and dative cases in the first volume. Two more cases appear in the second, and you only learn the ablative at the end of the fourth. O tempora, o mores, as no schoolboy says any more.

Over the last decade, there has been a minor Latin revival, but it is a watered-down version of the language that has been revived. Rigorous Latin lessons are as dead as can be, except in a handful of grammar schools and private schools. So N.M. Gwynne is entering upon virgin territory with this timely guide to learning Latin properly. A former businessman and now a Latin tutor, he had a smash hit last year with Gwynne’s Grammar, a rigorous guide to English grammar. Now he’s applied the same winning formula to the most influential language of them all.

Reading the book is like taking the Tardis back to the golden, prelapsarian days of the 1950s. The spiritual forefathers of Gwynne’s Latin are those titans among textbooks: North and Hillard’s Latin Prose Composition and Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer (or Shortbread-Eating Primer, to give it its rightful name).