‘Who are these Fowlers?’ wrote a reviewer in the New York Times, quoted on page 56 of this much-needed biography of the more famous of the brothers, Henry Watson Fowler. The review was not of Modern English Usage or any of their other well-known books, but of an earlier work they wrote for Oxford University Press, a translation of the Syrian Greek writer Lucian of Samosata, published in 1905, the work that first brought them into contact with the strange world of academic publishing.