An unrivalled collection of literary gossip and intimate sidelights on the lives of authors. The dictionary defines an anecdote as `a short account of an entertaining or interesting incident`, and the anecdotes in this collection more than live up to that description. Many of them are funny, often explosively so. Others are touching, outrageous, sinister, inspiring, or downright weird. They show writers in the English-speaking world from Chaucer to the present acting both unpredictably, and deeply in character. The range is wide - this is a book which finds room for Milton and Margaret Atwood, George Eliot and P.G.Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe and Ian Fleming, Brendan Behan and Wittgenstein. It is also a book in which you can find out which great historian`s face was once mistaken for a baby`s bottom, which film star once left a hauncting account of Virginia Woolf not long before her death, and what Agatha Christie really thought of Hercule Poirot - a book not just for lovers of literature, but anyone with a taste for the curiosities of human nature.

ISBN: 0 19 280468 5

A touching memoir of a Jewish-English childhood in 1940s East End London.

John Gross is the son of a Jewish doctor who practiced in East End London from the 1920s to WW2 and later. His parents were the children of immigrants, steeped in the customs and traditions of Eastern Europe, yet outside the home he grew up in the very English world of comics and corner shops, sandbags and bombsites. Looking back on his childhood with humour and insight, he reflects on his double inheritance. The richness of Yiddish words, the rituals and mysteries of the synagogue are set against the life of the streets, where boxers and gangsters are heroes and patients turn up on the door step at all hours.