Have you ever found yourself irritated when a sine qua non or a mea culpa is thrown into the conversation by a particularly annoying person? Or do distant memories of afternoons spent struggling to learn obscure verbs fill you with dread? Never fear! (Or as a Latin show-off might say, Nil desperandum!). In this delightful guided tour of Latin, which features everything from a Monty Python grammar lesson to David Beckham's tattoos and all the best snippets of prose and poetry from 2000 years of literary history, Harry Mount wipes the dust off those boring primers and breathes life back into the greatest language of them all.