This morning I was dipping in and out of both the Telegraph and Steven Pinker’s wonderful book on the science of language, The Language Instinct.
We have a report on a new study suggesting that grammar schools improve the results of working-class pupils and raise educational standards in general. Bad news for the Tory leader, David Cameron, who has infuriated some of his own MPs and party members by turning against grammars, on the grounds that selection at 11 condemns poor children to a poor education.
 Where can he look for support? Pinker, in a passage on the dullness of much academic writing on linguistics, suggests an answer: Shakespeare. Here is Jack Cade, leader of the mob, in The Second Part of King Henry VI:
  “Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school… It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.”