Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit: Untranslatable Insults, Put-Downs and Curses From Around the World
By Dr Robert Vanderplank
Boxtree £17.99
FT bookshop price: £14.39

A genial but pointless collection of affronts – from the Turkish for “arsehole” to the Czech for “You look like the Mona Lisa after a spanking.” Too often the book seems like a sort of linguistic taxidermy: by the time these idioms have been pulled out of context, translated into English, and pedantically explained, they no longer growl.