A unique and vastly entertaining collection of over 700 anecdotes from Chaucer to J. K. Rowling, selected by the supreme man of letters and premier anthologist, John Gross

The anecdotalists include some of the best-known recorders of conversation, such as John Aubrey and James Boswell, but in addition there are gems from little-known memoirists and biographers, from interviews and broadcasts, and from writers on writers e.g. Conan Doyle on Oscar Wilde, P. G. Wodehouse on H. G. Wells

As well as anecdotes about writers, subjects also include historians, statesmen, philosophers, academics, and theologians

Arranged chronologically by date of birth of the subject of the anecdote, the anthology is also a wonderfully engaging informal history of writing and publishing down the centuries

Many of the anecdotes offer revealing insights into writers` personalities, their frailties and insecurities: they are by turn poignant, and hilariously funny. Includes brief commentary by John Gross where necessary to explain context, and an introduction discussing the history and nature of the anecdote as a literary form


An unrivalled collection of literary gossip and intimate sidelights on the lives of the authors.

The dictionary defines an anecdote as `a short account of an entertaining or interesting incident`, and the anecdotes in this collection more than live up to that description. Many of them are funny, often explosively so. Others are touching, outrageous, sinister, inspiring, or downright weird. They show writers in the English-speaking world from Chaucer to the present acting both unpredictably, and deeply in character. The range is wide - this is a book which finds room for Milton and Margaret Atwood, George Eliot and P. G. Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe and Ian Fleming, Brendan Behan and Wittgenstein. It is also a book in which you can find out which great historian`s face was once mistaken for a baby`s bottom, which film star left a haunting account of Virginia Woolf not long before her death, and what Agatha Christie really thought of Hercule Poirot - a book not just for lovers of literature, but for anyone with a taste for the curiosities of human nature.