topics: |  literature | biography | critic

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 offer revealing insights into writers'
personalities, their frailties and insecurities. Some of the anecdotes are
funny, often explosively so, while others are touching, sinister, 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 that finds room for anecdotes about Milton
and Margaret Atwood, George Eliot and Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe and Bob
Dylan, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Wittgenstein. The authors of the anecdotes
are equally diverse, from the diarists John Aubrey, John Evelyn and James
Boswell to fellow writers such as W. H. Auden, Harriet Martineau, Walter
Scott, Evelyn Waugh, and Vanessa Bell.

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. The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes is a book
not just for lovers of literature, but for anyone with a taste for the
curiosities of human nature.