Four years ago, in the autumn of 2012, Mark Thompson was about to move from England to the United States to take up his new job as president and CEO of The New York Times. He had spent much of his career at the BBC, his final eight years there as director-general. But before moving to New York, he visited his alma mater, Oxford, where he delivered three lectures on rhetoric and the art of public persuasion. Those talks became the basis of his new book, Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics? (St. Martin’s, $27.99). What remarkable timing for a book on the language of politics! But while Thompson does spend time assessing Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric, his work is a larger examination of how political language has evolved and how public discourse generally has degenerated, with damaging consequences for public trust and confidence. Freely mixing personal experiences with criticism and opinion, Thompson has produced a book that, as Publishers Weekly put it, “manages to be an exemplary investigation, a history, an autopsy, a practical manual, and a cautionary tale all at once.”