M. J. Cohen Libros

This volume of memorable quotations, old and new, will be useful for competition entries and crosswords, speeches or letters or purely to dip into for entertainment.

With a foreword by Simon Schama, one of the world’s foremost historians, and with 9000 chronological quotations arranged in 90 thematic chapters, this huge treasury is bursting with historical gems. The verbal banquet comes courtesy of such diverse figures as Herodotus, Charlemagne, Dante, Shakespeare, Thomas More, Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, Harriet Tubman, Rasputin, Lenin, Nehru, Al Capone, Churchill, Charles Lindbergh, Mao, Gloria Steinem, Susan Sontag, and hundreds more. These aren’t quick one-liners, but richly detailed and generous excerpts from speeches, documents, literature, and other sources. Every continent and every major civilization receives representation and enlightening commentary, with topics ranging from the toppling of nations to the changes in science. All the quotations have annotations, with details about sources.

This anthology includes the best of three collections of comic and curious verse which first appeared with enormous success in the 1950s. It covers the whole tradition of English and American comic verse writing from the masters - Hood, Lear, Carrol -, to anonymous lampoonists of the 18th-century, up to the present day.

There you are, writing a letter or a speech, or even just arguing with your friends, when you think: there must be a succint way of putting this. Surely a single one-liner could do a better job than my own ill-chosen and long-winded words? Thankfully, we have the epigram - that handy, witty saying that closes arguments, sets people thinking and generally makes everyone else think you're much cleverer than you really are. The Penguin Dictionary of Epigrams is arranged thematically, covering everything from birth and death, knowledge and ignorance to marriage and divorce and madness and sanity.