Description

‘Reveals fascinating truths about history – my favourite kind of book’ SATHNAM SANGHERA

‘A delightful and moving account of our efforts to capture the truth as it speeds by’ TIM HARFORD

A secret script? A memory-boosting tool? What exactly is shorthand?

Cicero’s scribe invented it. Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens and even Astrid Lindgren used it. Rivalries, adulteries and actual martyrdoms arose from it. Spycraft was reliant on it, courtroom dramas were changed by it, and feminism has an uneasy debt to it. But today, its continuing existence is at risk. So, what exactly is shorthand? What has it given us? And what would we lose if this world-changing technology disappeared?

Andrew Hill follows the story from the scribes of Ancient Rome to today’s takeover of AI, revealing how a system of symbols invented to speedily transcribe speech shaped the modern world and can still offer a valuable way to record, store and recall our brightest ideas today.

Publisher Review

My favourite kind of book: something fantastically niche and nerdy that reveals fascinating truths about history — Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland Brisk, ingenious and full of intriguing loops and turns. This is a witty, wonderfully compressed history of an art that helped write the modern world. — Rebecca Lee, author * Rogues, Widows and Orphans * A delightful and moving account of our efforts to capture the truth as it speeds by. Take Note is full of splendid curiosities and surprising tales — Tim Harford, author of How To Make The World Add Up Shorthand captures otherwise lost voices; Andrew Hill’s extraordinary history does the same, in elegantly recounted stories of ingenuity and innovation from Cicero to Churchill; Pepys to Pippa Longstocking — David Bodanis, author of E=mc2 A must read for anyone who wants to understand a half-hidden feature of our modern world. Hill shows that the history of shorthand is an astonishingly good way to explore our economic and social development over the centuries – and his analysis is more relevant than ever at a time when AI is challenging us to think afresh about communication — Gillian Tett, author of Fool’s Gold Shorthand, a system of fast writing that uses lines and simple signs, used to be almost as ubiquitous in offices as computer software is today. Now, says Hill, the FT’s senior business writer, it is mostly a pithy way of summing up a subject. He argues that we might be carelessly discarding a precious tool — What to Read in 2026 * Financial Times * Delightful quirky love letter to shorthand through the ages. Makes me regret I never mastered it — Lucy Kellaway OBE, author of In Office Hours and founder of Now Teach An entertaining and engaging page-turner. Andrew Hill makes a convincing case for the survival of “the winged art” in a digital age — Sir Richard Lambert, former chair of Bloomsbury and the British Museum