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. They have extended an increasing welcome to the popular and the contemporary, to mass entertainment, the media and everyday speech.
The new, seventh edition, edited by Elizabeth Knowles, takes the process a stage further. Rather too far, if one were to judge by some of the more breathless publicity it has received — most notably the excitement over the inclusion among those quoted of Paris Hilton. But publicity is publicity, and it can be misleading. Anyone worried that the dictionary’s traditional strengths have been jettisoned need take only the briefest glance at the contents for reassurance. There are still 100 quotations from Virgil, for instance, and no less than 240 from Milton.
As for the inroads of popular culture, they are as justifiable in principle — this is the world we live in — as they are entertaining in practice. They can be most easily inspected in the special sections on advertising slogans, headlines, film titles and the like, where there is much happy delving to be done, and where many memories are stirred — not least of what has been left out.
The omissions can hardly be called troublesome — finding oneself thinking of them is one of the book’s pleasures — but they can seem decidedly arbitrary. If you limit yourself to a single whisky advertisement, what makes you choose Haig (‘Don’t be vague’) rather than, say, Johnny Walker (‘Still going strong’)? ‘I was a seven-stone weakling’ — yes, but then why not ‘You too can have a body like mine’? Or again, we are grateful to be reminded of schoolgirl complexions and Eastern promise, and delighted to be introduced to an advertisement from the 1890s promoting ‘pink pills for pale people’ — but whatever happened to ‘Skegness is So Bracing’ or ‘Snap, Crackle and Pop’?
The short answer is that there isn’t enough space, and that hard choices have had to be made. The same is true of other fields, such as film dialogue. In the scene in A Night at the Opera in which Groucho Marx tries to sell an insurance policy, Elizabeth Knowles opts for the bit about the sanity clause (‘There ain’t no sanity clause’) rather than the bit about missing legs (‘If you lose a leg, we help you to look for it’). It is the right decision, but one suspects that it wasn’t an easy one.
Titles of books, plays and films also provide fertile quotation territory, though once again the editor’s decisions provoke a certain amount of dissent. We are given Chips (with everything), but then why not Chips as in Goodbye Mr? The Common Pursuit gets in as the title of a collection of essays by F. R. Leavis, in which case it should also feature as the title of the play by Simon Gray — and while we are at it, there should be a reference to the phrase by T. S. Eliot (‘the common pursuit of true judgment’) from which it derives.
Catchphrases also abound in the dictionary — rightly so, though it has to be said that some people earn their passport to immortality on fairly easy terms. Jeremy Paxman, for example, finds himself ranged alongside Plato and Pascal on the strength of ‘Come on! Come on!’ (from University Challenge). But of course it all depends how they tell them. And not knowing how she tells it, I’m baffled by the inclusion of a ‘customary form of approbation’ used on television by the American domestic guru Martha Stewart: ‘It’s a good thing.’
As for the great mass of contemporary or near-contemporary quotations that have been chosen, many are admirable. Many others will no doubt look better when they have acquired the patina of age. But some show their authors writing well below their best (does Frederic Raphael really want to go down to posterity as the man who called Cambridge ‘the city of perspiring dreams’?), while the miscellaneous social and political opinions of recent years that are on display often seem more like sayings of the week than the wisdom of the ages. Not a particularly good week, either. Why waste space, to take a random example, on Norman Mailer opining that ‘the security around the American president is just to make sure the man who shoots him gets caught’? It isn’t true, and it isn’t even funny.
All this is a far cry, however, from the impression left by the dictionary as a whole. It is a book which can be explored pretty well indefinitely, and one which yields fresh satisfactions and surprises every time you return to it. A strong candidate, in fact, for the desert island. But one still hopes that when the next edition comes round, the more modern material will be selected with a keener judgment.
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