Jeremy Lewis
What Adam Told Eve
The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes
By John Gross (ed)
Oxford University Press 384pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Back in the 1970s, James Sutherland prompted a flurry of Oxford anthologies with his hugely successful Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes. Though much admired at the time, it was, as far as the lay reader was concerned, a fairly tedious piece of work, in that too many of the extracts were from obscure writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – which made sense in terms of copyright fees, but lent a somewhat antiquarian flavour to the proceedings. Taking us all the way from Chaucer and Thomas More to Jeanette Winterson and J K Rowling, John Gross’s replacement volume is a good deal broader in its scope (he is particularly strong on the Victorians and Edwardians, and includes American and Commonwealth writers as well as British), but it, too, is a curiously disconcerting volume, at least on first acquaintance.
The most popular anthologies, I suspect, cunningly combine the familiar and the much-loved with the unknown and the unexpected; and those who long to find all the old favourites under one roof in a literary equivalent of These We Have Loved
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw