a surprisingly good selection...a collection that will instruct and, more important, give immense pleasure. Contemporary Review, Volume 288 An informative and amusing collection Patrick Richards, Day by Day John Gross's enlightening and hugely enjoyable anthology revivifies the literary dust of many centuries with both wit and grace Peter Parker, TLS Mr Gross has also produced succinct notes to help the reader and has, over all, produced a collection that will instruct and, more importantly, give immense pleasure Contemporary Review Gross widens and strenthens the idea of a literary anecdote, with enriching results. Books like this are usually recommnded as ideal bedtime reading. This one, however, should on no account be allowed in the bedroom, or you will find youself awake in the cold, small hours, still turning the pages. John Carey, Sunday Times John Gross has produced a fascinating book. Jonathan Sale, Financial Times Magazine so many things here to enjoy Jeremy Lewis, Literary Review The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes is a great feast of stories. Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday a pithy and eclectic collection of tales that reveal the vanity, generosity, foolishness and wisdom of writers, but above all their eccentricity...Such anecdotes are literary garnish. Not to be confused with the meat and drink of literature itself, they are the piquant canapes accompanying a writer's life; they should be savoured, swallowed whole with a willing suspension of disbelief, and on no account regurgitated in after-dinner speeches. Ben Macintyre, Times

The subjects of the anecdotes include all the major British, American, and Commonwealth writers, starting with Chaucer, Sir Thomas More and Sir Walter Raleigh, then Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Johnson, Swift, Pope, Hume, Edmund Burke, Gibbon, Jefferson, the Romantics, Fenimore Cooper, Macaulay, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Abraham Lincoln, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, Whitman, Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, Twain, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Cather, Robert Frost, Carson McCuller, Salinger, Mailer, Larkin, Vonnegut, Burroughs, Bellow, Churchill, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, Updike, Philip Roth, Wole Soyinka, Les Murray, Margaret Atwood, Stoppard, Coetzee, Chatwin, Bob Dylan, Rushdie, McEwan, Amis, Jeanette Winterson etc; Authors of the anecdotes are equally diverse, from the diarists John Aubrey, John Evelyn and James Boswell to fellow writers e.g. Wodehouse, Auden,Harriet Martineau, Walter Scott, Evelyn Waugh, Vanessa Bell; modern biographers such as Selina Hastings, journals and radio interviews