True confession: back in the dim dark days of my English classes, I do not remember ever running into verb conjugation. Tenses- past, present, and future – absolutely. And I could diagram a sentence a treat. But otherwise, you would just go with what sounded right (and it was helpful if you read a lot), but you mean there are rules? Pfft. This is English.
I first ran into verb conjugation when I took up Spanish. Spanish is such a reasonable language. No silent letters to speak of, and sure there are the occasional accents, but they only go in one direction (looking at you, French). A few irregular verbs, and there’s the formal/informal you, but you could always be formal to everyone, and now you only have four forms to remember! Go, Spanish!
So I was surprised at this little taste of Latin grammar. Oh my. So much more complex. This book was clearly written as a backup tutorial for British public schoolboys, and is basically a series of conjugation charts, which I merrily skipped over, and all sorts of odd tidbits, which were fun. A list of the important emperors of Rome? OK! A list of common Latin phrases and abbreviations and what they actually stand for, such as i.e., ibid, ad hoc, etc. ? Think I got about half of those right (would have been more if I had studied law).
And how did I know who its intended audience was? Towards the beginning, Mount quotes Kingsley Amis as dividing Latin users between Berks (confident Latin nerds) and Wankers (who just use Latin to sound important, even when it doesn’t really fit). Well, then. This was a bit of fun, but probably not too useful unless you are one of the aforementioned schoolboys.