John Gross

A good dictionary of quotations is part-reference book, part-anthology. It is a place where you go to check things up, and where you stay to browse. Many of the items it includes are there not so much because people are actually in the habit of quoting them, but because they are judged to be quotable.

A few years ago the American author Anne Fadiman scored a hit with Ex Libris, an amiable miscellany of book-talk touching lightly on such topics as the quirks of proof-reading and the vicissitudes of plagiarism. The subject matter of her new book, At Large and At Small, is much more varied, but the flavour is