Lloyd John - Advanced banter: the QI book of quotations

Stephen Fry They say that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the last person to read everything. By the time he died there were now too many books, they suggest, for any one single brain to engage with. They, as usual, are wrong. There were already millions of books in Europe by the year 1500, just half a century after the first printed page flew from the first press. To read a million books in a lifetime you would have to read forty a day for seventy years. I couldnt even manage half that amount for half as long with cigarettes before giving up and it takes a lot longer to read a book than to smoke a cigarette, let me tell you.

Philosophers, wits, novelists, cooks, poets, essayists, herbalists, mathematicians, builders, poets and divines had poured out more thoughts in that first fifty years than had been committed to paper or vellum in the previous thousand. And the rate only continued to increase as it approached this centurys dizzyingly insane levels of oversupply. With so much flowing from so many different human brains, who can be arsed to read it? Not I, sir and madam, not I. Its all I can do to peruse the side of a packet of breakfast cereal without distraction from radio, television and phone. I have no doubt you are in the same case. You would dearly like to suck intellectual and metaphysical juice from the fruity flesh of the worlds best thinkers and writers but the treetops are all out of reach and it would be too much of a fag to go and fetch a ladder.

If only someone would pick, pulp and squeeze that fruit for you, you have been thinking not the usual anthologisers, but those splendid elves from the Quite Interesting team, the fruits of whose labours are offered with such satisfying and repetitive regularity on the BBC and channels Dave, Mike, Pete, Steve and Neville. Your wish has been answered in the quote interesting volume even now stuffed up your pullover as you streak for the bookshops security barrier. There has never been a collection like it. Look in vain for the obvious, the banal and the platitudinous. On every page you will marvel at what oft was thought but neer so well expressed. Biarritz, Dublin and Hell