That last sentence is a good description of the sort of quotation for which we turn to books like this to nail down. In part that is the task performed by the radio show Quote Unquote, with which Nigel Rees has been connected for 30 years, and upon which he draws heavily. But, curiously, many quotation seem to be included because they have supplied titles for books or films. This can lead to bathos, as with ‘chance governs all’, from Paradise Lost giving the title to the memoirs of Marmaduke Hussey (2002), or ‘In the bleak mid-winter’, Christina Rossetti’s line, used for a film directed by Kenneth Branagh (1996).
Despite this hazard, Brewer’s Famous Quotations can be read straight through with pleasure, in bedside helpings. It is interesting to learn that Proust was said to have disapproved of the English title Remembrance of Things Past provided by his translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff until he was told it came from Shakespeare (Sonnet 30: ‘When to the Sessions of sweet silent thought/ I summon up remembrance of things past…’).
By and large, the governing Reesian principle is like that of 1066 and All That: he explains all the quotations you can remember. So, the only quotation, other than the title, from that wordy Frenchman is a sentence or two about the madeleine, which Nigel Rees calls ‘the key moment in the novel and, if truth be told, the only one most people know about’.
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