Brewer's Concise Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, Betty Kirkpatrick (Editor)

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. A good, clean, copy.

Genres: Reference

1136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Rozonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never believed a work of reference could be read for pleasure (like some famous writers, like Borges, claim to do) until I found this dictionary. Chock-full with anecdote, historical gossip, curious quotes and strange lists, it goes quite beyond phrase and fable-mythology, the Bible, everyday proverbs, literary references, get together in a miscellanea that is hard to describe. A description of famous Bibles with printing errors, a list of famous people and their dying words,descriptions of fairytales characters, symbologies of flowers and plants, opening lines of national hymns, origins of popular proverbs (British and American)...Sounds anarchic? It is. But it's also lots of fun (outdated maybe, but still a lot of fun)