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The linguist David Crystal, together with his actor son Ben Crystal, have travelled the world in search of different spoken Englishes for ‘You Say Potato’ (MacMillan). But what about the accent with no sense of place, Received Pronunciation? Do we still trust RP, and can this relatively new accent survive into the future? You can add your own accent to David and Ben’s Potato Map

The latest issue of Poetry Ireland Review is dedicated to Seamus Heaney, who died last year. Editor Vona Groake, explains that the issue features essays from 50 different poets, each of whom were asked to explore how a single poem of their choice works ‘someething akin to looking inside a longcase clock from the eighteenth century to examine the mechanism.

each poem worked’. Vona also reads from latest poetry collection, ‘X’ (Gallery Press)

The academic Will Abberley is one of the Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers, and The Verb’s new punctuation specialist. This week he’s looking at the dash – which definitely isn’t the hyphen ! Will explores the cloudy origins of this punctuation mark which first appeared in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Do we like the dash because it’s so hard to misuse?

The Man Booker prize shortlisted author of ‘Narcopolis’ (Faber) returns to The Verb as part of our ‘Foreign Books in a Foreign Land’ series. Jeet explains some of the possible reasons behind the popularity of ‘Mein Kampf’ in India, which is frequently for sale at train stations.

For our podcast-only extra series, Vona Groarke pulls apart the myth of the ‘I’ of the poem – should it have to be identified with the poet?