There’s a famous moment in Molière’s comedy The Bourgeois Gentleman when the philosopher rather pompously distinguishes between prose and verse; Jourdain, the old buffoon, comments with wonderment, ‘I have been speaking prose for forty years and I never knew it!’. It is easy to take prose for granted. It’s what everyone speaks, after all (and always has done); it’s what is taught at school as the normal and expected manner of communication. Prose is inevitably thought to be the ‘natural’ way to write. So how could a book be called The Invention of Prose? Hasn’t prose always been with us?