SOURCE: “Murray and His Monument,” in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3940, September 30, 1977, pp. 1094-95.

In the following review of K. M. Elisabeth Murray's Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary, Burgess expresses an appreciation for James Murray's modern approach to language.

When Becky Sharp threw away her copy of Johnson's Dictionary—Miss Pinkerton's invariable gift to her departing students—it was not the least of her gestures in the direction of modernity. That book was a dog walking on its hind legs and, moreover, walking backwards. It tried to fix standards of usage in terms of the undefiled wells from which writers from Sir Philip Sidney to the Restoration drank; it wanted to make a closed garden of the English lexis; it prescribed as well as described. It was also more of an autobiography than a work of lexicography. It was decidedly...