If you’ve ever wondered where the immortal phrase ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ originated, tried to establish who first said that ‘truth is stranger than fiction’, been puzzled by rumours that Neil Armstrong never said ‘That’s one small step for man …’ or rashly assumed that Salome’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ must be mentioned somewhere in the Bible, then Brewer’s Famous Quotations is here to put you on the right track.
Revealing the intriguing stories behind some 5,000 quotations, from Julius Caesar’s supposed dying words (‘Et tu, Brute?’) to George W Bush’s ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’, Nigel Rees offers detailed insights into a host of misremembered, misattributed and generally problematic quotations.
Nigel Rees has been the deviser and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Quote … Unquote for the past thirty years. His numerous publications on the subject of well-known phrases and sayings include Cassell’s Humorous Quotations and Cassell’s Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins.