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An early highlight of this fully revised millennium edition of
Brewer's is Terry Pratchett's short, sweetly ironic preface. It's entirely appropriate, given
Brewer's has been the bread-and-butter of curious, self-educated working men and women for 130 years, and that this decade's great demotic writer should be invited to watch the dust settle on yet another deposit of curious knowledge. ("It's an education in itself, seeing [the Fab Four] take their place with old Roman senators and mythological fauna ... ").
Brewer's is famously, fabulously useless. There is not the remotest possibility that it contains anything you might actually be looking up at the time. In this, it closely resembles that great modern intellectual irritant, the World Wide Web. Where it bests the upstart Web is in its wit, its erudition and in its disposability. Mind you, frustrated users should wield the new edition with caution. Adrian Room has introduced French jargon, inkhorn literary terms and many more historical and fictional characters to the familiar "alms-basket of words".
But it is through the number of extra phrases and quotations that Room truly distinguishes this edition--and who can resist passages of verse like the one which accompanies a new entry for Technogamia, a 1618 play of such mind-crushing tediousness that James I "made several efforts to leave after sitting out the first two acts"? By complete contrast, there's never a dull moment to be had with this great, daft, pointless, wonderful brick of a book. --Simon Ings
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An idiosyncratic adventure, pulling you in and saying: "this is, in fact, not what you werelooking for; but it's much more interesting." -- Terry Pratchett Of all the dictionaries in the world [Brewer's] is the most like a treasure-hunt, where one phrase leads to another, and that to a third, and before you know what's happened, it's time for lunch. -- Philip Pullman Brewer's head-words are so enticing and his definitions so eloquent that it's impossible to stop at one. An addiction may develop. -- Carol Rumens, The Independent 20080912
von Alan Bennett
von Louis Sachar
von Bill Bryson
von Bill Bryson
