Cassell Dictionary of Insulting Quotations - Softcover

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....

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