Just before Christmas, Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots And Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation was the UK #1 bestseller of all books. And there are now reputedly over 500,000 copies in print.

Back in November 2003, the Herald reprinted a review by UK newspaper The Independent. Now our own Peter Calder gives his opinion in Canvas magazine, lauding Truss’s efforts:

… she wrote a book that will give heart to sticklers everywhere who despair at potato’s and the indiscriminate interchange of “its” and “it’s”, never mind singular criteria and phenomena or those checkout queues for shoppers with “eight items or less”…

Buy it for a stickler you love. Then, if you’re not a stickler, borrow it and read it.

Quite.

PS: Why Eats, Shoots And Leaves? A panda walked into a cafe. He ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter. 'Why?' groaned the injured man. The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and walked out. And sure enough, when the waiter consulted the book, he found an explanation. 'Panda,' read the entry for his assailant. 'Large black and white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'