'Considine achieves a good balance of primary and secondary sources, surveying the existing scholarship and advancing it with new research, and he writes with admirable clarity. … Essential.' J. T. Lynch, Choice
'Rarely does one feel it's a privilege to read a scholarly work, but when I finished the last sentence of John Considine's Academy Dictionaries 1600–1800, I felt that privilege - I felt intellectual satisfaction and a humane connection to the subject I had not imagined on opening the book - and knew that I would soon read the whole book again, with yet more pleasure and benefit than in the first instance. Though a compact book, [it] is profound intellectual and cultural history, as well as essential history of lexicography, brilliantly executed. Considine manages to tell a story about a forest without losing sight of the very trees without which the forest would be merely an idea, rather than a historical reality, and he does so with remarkable - and characteristic - intellectual perspective and narrative dexterity.' Michael Adams, Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America