People on People:The Oxford Dictionary of Biographical Quotations

Edited by Susan Ratcliffe
Oxford University Press
ISBN 0–19–866261-0

Introduction

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,and that is not being talked about,’ said Oscar Wilde. This collection of quotations brings together what all sorts of people have had to say about each other: whether admiring, disapproving, cruel, or just witty.
Most of the quotations are from people who are just as famous as the people they are talking about. So Albert Einstein describes Marie Curie as ‘very intelligent, but as cold as a herring’, Danny Blanchflower talks about George Best who has ‘ice in his veins, warmth in his heart, and timing and balance in his feet’, and Pablo Casals comments on Jacqueline du Pré: ‘Oh, I like it—she moves with the music.’ But in real life people do not restrict themselves to their own field: Oscar Wilde talks about Chopin and John Stuart Mill as well as more obvious targets such as Aubrey Beardsley and George Bernard Shaw. John Milton talks about ‘the famous Galileo grown old’, Martin Luther thinks Copernicus ‘will turn the whole art of astronomy inside out’, and Bob Dylan ‘learned as much from Cézanne as . . . from Woody Guthrie.

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