On the Shelf

A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. “Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. “I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.” The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots, and leaves.”

If you share the panda’s — and Truss’s — militant distaste for the misplaced comma, the missing apostrophe or the intrusive hyphen, this is the book for you. And even if you don’t, it guarantees a laugh a page and the odd sigh of agreement on the basic courtesies of proper punctuation.