If “Small is beautiful” (E.F. Schumacher) and “Less is more” (Mies van der Rohe), then this compact A6‐sized gem is treasure indeed! After all “The best things come in small packages” (English proverb). I'm sorry, but I cannot review a dictionary of quotations without quoting from it! Emerson hated quotations, he wanted to know what people, themselves, knew, not like Dorothy Sayers who had a quotation for everything as “it saves original thinking”. I prefer Montaigne's “I quote others only the better to express myself”.
This book contains some 4,000 of the most famous and most useful sayings in the English language selected from the 20,000 or more quotations from the larger Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (RR 2010/154). The quotations are divided into some 300 subjects arranged alphabetically from ability, absences, and achievement, to work, writing, and youth. cross‐references are given to related headings. within each subject the quotations are arranged in alphabetical order of the author's name with a brief description for each author. Thus “Zsa Zsa Gabor 1919 – Hungarian‐born film actress”. If needed, background information is given to aid understanding the quotation. An index is provided of authors with a note of the subject heading(s) used for their quotation(s). Unsurprisingly, Anonymous, the Bible, and Shakespeare are the most prolific quoted sources, but Francis Bacon, Winston Churchill, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde also feature prominently. Authors may be as ancient as Socrates (e.g. “The unexamined life is not worth living”) and Plato (“Of all animals the boy is the most unmanageable”) or as modern as David Cameron (“The Big Society is our big idea”) and Barak Obama (“Yes we can”). In considering the sources of quotations, I was intrigued by the mention in the Foreword of help given by staff in the Quotations Reading Programme. Is this, I wonder, a team of staff who read books to find good quotes? Or are they people who check sources? If the former, I'd love to join!
Dictionaries of quotations are useful for many purposes. These include verifying the correct wording; learning the original source; and finding witty or thought‐provoking sayings for speeches and presentations. This particular book is not suitable for the library shelves since it is too small and likely to get buried; reference libraries would do better to have the parent volume noted above. But this little gem fits well in the pocket or handbag to browse on journeys, or to sit on domestic shelves as a useful home reference tool or a fun browse.
