John Gross

A good dictionary of quotations is part-reference book, part-anthology. It is a place where you go to check things up, and where you stay to browse. Many of the items it includes are there not so much because people are actually in the habit of quoting them, but because they are judged to be quotable. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which was first published in 1941, has always been committed to this double role, with conspicuous success. But over the years there has been a shift of emphasis. The original dictionary broadly reflected the culture of club, common room and rectory. In later editions, the compilers have come to take a more democratic (or realistic) view of what most readers are likely to be familiar with.

A few years ago the American author Anne Fadiman scored a hit with Ex Libris, an amiable miscellany of book-talk touching lightly on such topics as the quirks of proof-reading and the vicissitudes of plagiarism. The subject matter of her new book, At Large and At Small, is much more varied, but the flavour is scarcely less literary. It is a collection of essays, designed to illustrate the continuing possibilities of what used to be known as the familiar essay — the bundle of personal reflections of which the most famous exponent was Charles Lamb. Familiar essays, cherished in their heyday by belletrists and inflicted on generations of schoolchildren, have long since lost favour as a literary form. But Fadiman isn’t afraid of being thought old-fashioned.