The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations (Oxford Quick Reference) - Softcover

Peter Kemp is Fiction Editor of the Sunday Times, a Visiting Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford, and a Visiting Professor at Kingston University. His previous publications include Muriel Spark and H.G. Wells and the Culminating Age.

What is literature? Depending on whom one asks, it's "a drug" (George Borrow); "the question minus the answer" (Roland Barthes); "the orchestration of platitudes" (Thornton Wilder); or "a splendid mistress, but a bad wife" (Rudyard Kipling). These bon mots and over 4,400 others (one-fifth of them new to this edition) are gathered here by Kemp, the fiction editor of the (London) Sunday Times. The quotes, as before, are organized by theme, which include Writer's Block, Morality and Tools of the Trade; Collaboration, Graffiti and Epitaphs are among several themes also new to this edition. An author index makes it easy to find out what Nabokov said about art ("Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art") or what Barbara Pym thought of poetry anthologies ("What a bad sign it is to get the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse out of the library"). All in all, this is an edifying and highly diverting resource for any student of writing and language.
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