Review:
It's hard to resist a book that has for its own jacket copy the following sentence: "Cruel, snide, rude and bitchy, the Cassell Dictionary of Insulting Quotations records the human spirit at its least spiritual." For once, there's truth in advertising: this book is a glorious celebration of how scathingly, hilariously, and aptly mean people have been to one another through the centuries. In its pages you'll find writers skewering writers; politicians badmouthing other politicians; nations insulting other nations; and, of course, critics savaging everyone in sight. There's Georges Clemenceau on the United States: "America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization." Or Robert Hughes on the artist Jeff Koons: "The last bit of methane left in the intestine of the dead cow that is post-modernism." It's all good, dirty fun--and great for plagiarizing the next time you need witty dinner party repartee. Just be careful who you sit next to....
About the Author:
Jonathon Green is Britain's leading lexicographer of slang. His many creditsinclude the Macmillan Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, Slang Down the Ages,Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made, The Cassell Dictionary of Slang (published to great acclaim in December 1998), and most recently, the best-selling Big Book of Filth, a survey of 6500 sex slang wor
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