Acknowledgements

Nothing in this book is new. To my helpers, Alex Dudok de Wit and George Morris, has fallen the task of gathering the mountain from which I have assembled this personal molehill of an anthology. They have worked hard for many months, and I am grateful. I have relied not only on their industry, but their judgement. Cecily Gayford, at Profile Books, has been a wise and helpful editor.

My thanks to those hundreds of friends and long-shot acquaintances whom we contacted for suggestions, many of which have found their way into the book; to my peerless agent Ed Victor; a special word of thanks to Andrew Franklin, my proactive and creative editor for the first, Penguin, edition of this book, and now my publisher. Thanks also to Dr Richard Parkinson at the British Museum and to the editors of dozens of dictionaries, anthologies and works of reference in this field, on whose research we have drawn. These are too numerous to list in full, but the following have been particularly useful:

An Anthology of Invective and Abuse, ed. Hugh Kingsmill (London, 1930); A Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations, ed. Jonathan Green (London, 1982); A Dictionary of International Slurs, ed. A. A. Roback (Wisconsin, 1979); A Dictionary of Sexist Quotations, ed. Selma James (Hemel Hempstead, 1984); The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humour by Amy Richlin (London, 1983); The Guinness Dictionary of Poisonous Quotes, ed. Colin Jarman (London, 1991); Lexicon of Musical Invective by Nicholas Slonimsky (Washington, DC, 1965); Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression, ed. Rheinhold Aman (1977–86); Picking on Men by Judy Allen (London, 1985); Shakespeare’s Insults, ed. Wayne Hill and Cynthia J. Ottchen (Cambridge, 1992); Far Too Noisy, My Dear Mozart, ed. Jennifer Higgie (Michael O’Mara Books, 1997).

Acknowledgement is also due to HarperCollins Publishers Limited and Germaine Greer for The Female Eunuch; to William Heinemann Limited for Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham; to Guy Lee for The Poems of Catullus (OUP, 1990) by permission of Oxford University Press; to The Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate; to John Murray (Publishers) Limited for Slough by John Betjeman; to Laurence Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli for How Beastly the Bourgeois Is by D. H. Lawrence; to David Higham Associates and Osbert Sitwell for A Certain Statesman; and to Faber and Faber Limited for the following extracts: Philip Larkin’s ‘This be the Verse’ from High Windows; and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and to Matthew d’Ancona, former editor of The Spectator, for permission to quote from the magazine’s attack on Liverpool. For almost twenty years, The Week, has offered readers a discerning pick of pithy verbal insolence, and I have plundered this resource shamelessly.

The illustrations on pages 390 and 90 are reprinted courtesy of the British Museum Department of Egyptian Antiquities and the British Library respectively.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders. The author and publishers apologise for any errors or omissions, and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should appear in any reprint.

Finally I must acknowledge the intelligent energy of my assistant editor, Robbie Smith, in bringing this new edition to completion.

Matthew Parris, August 2016