Who said what and when

‘Those who can, write. Those who can’t, quote.’ Well, I’m sure someone has said it, although I have just looked it up in these two vast, baggy new books of quotations and it’s not there. Truth is, the great English tradition of hurling quotations at other people to show how clever you are seems to have disappeared over the past couple of generations. Instead we have books of quotations; indeed I seem to have rather a lot of them, mainly because I have a tendency to wander into bookshops after a long lunch. Surely no one buys a book of quotations when sober. They are books you want but don’t need; later on you realise you need them but shouldn’t have them. They always seem to be published at around this time of the year, purely to trap the unwary luncher.

Here, then, are two more, one American, one British, both very tempting. They are huge and beautifully produced, particularly the Yale one, which has that enticing smell of new American reference books that I always assume must be some sort of chemical additive, like the smell of bread that super- markets pump into the air at bakery counters. They are obviously the result of vast labour — in the Times’ case, so vast that no single person is credited with having edited the book, or worked on it at all. They are both infinitely browsable, so that 20 seconds supposedly looking up the precise wording of something Mark Twain once said becomes a 45-minute voyage of discovery, at the end of which you have completely forgotten why you opened the book in the first place. While neither of them is a patch on Andrew Martin’s masterly book of humorous quotations published last year — and newly republished in paperback as Funny You Should Say That (Penguin, £8.99)