(Still, she does remind us that his slogan “naughty but nice” was a 1939 movie title.) Should a book of quotations be arranged by author or subject? One needs both, and the Collins Quotation Finder (pounds 14.99) would be better if the text had been aligned so that the next page does not show. Such hefty volumes are better value than paperback spin-offs, but one is happy to browse in the likes of Peter D’Epiro’s number-based cultural listing, What Are The Seven Wonders of the World? (Metro, pounds 9.99).After a pedantic dispute in the TLS, William Boyd said that Adrian Room “must be Julian Barnes under another pseudonym”. The editor, Elizabeth Knowles, an authority on Old Norse, seems to have a cloth ear, and includes worthy but woolly remarks by Buchi Echmeta and Salman Rushdie, who probably do not remember them. Although printed too soon for the Lords’ demise, it notes another aspect of our times: MI6 and MI5 are listed, albeit with box-numbers redolent of a porn firm, but only the latter gives a telephone number. The Hutchinson Almanac undercuts it at pounds 30; flashier, but useful, it omits the Secret Service.The new Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (pounds 25) is again sabotaged by spurious relevancy. This is one of the year’s great bargains, a shot across the bows of The Times World Atlas (HarperCollins, pounds 125) which it will not sink, for a seemingly dry parade of names and facts has a poetry of its own, which has also been the style of Whitaker’s Almanack (The Stationery Office, pounds 40). Language still remains ceaselessly inventive, such as the Australian coining for female pubic hair: a mapatassie, from its resemblance to the shape of Tasmania.
Seek discreet medical attention should you resemble page 329 of Dorling Kindersley’s World Atlas (pounds 29.99), which uses a carbuncular, 3-D approach as well as the panoply of photographic effects which are the firm’s hallmark.

But Green, like Wood, is an independent spirit, not a corporate drone. Even so, Filth is less satisfying than the Dictionary of Slang (Cassell, pounds 25) from which it is spun off. Such books might appear to contradict the Professor Blackie cited by Wood – “avoid miscellaneous reading” – but a stray fact can yield more than systematic reading. A far cry from Wood’s moral tone is Jonathon Green, whose little Big Book of Filth (Cassell, pounds 6.99) contains 6500 sexual expressions, such as “get wood”. These are the principles by which to judge a reference work, even 100 years after Wood. As such, one of the most enjoyable books of the Nineties is James Wood’s Dictionary of Quotations (Warne), who ranges far from familiar territory and hopes that we shall “be generous to acquit him of having compiled either a superfluous or an unserviceable volume”.

`You’ve got the heart of a lion,’ he said.”For that feat alone, Stafford deserves whatever literary prizes are going this year.. LIFE IS short and reference books are long, but one can never have enough of them. Rugby Union’s Springboks and the Olympic champion rower Steve Redgrave were among those who took Stafford’s mind and body to the limits of their endurance.Stafford saved the most insane leg of his venture till last, going three rounds with Roy Jones Junior, the world light-heavyweight champion and the deadliest pound-for-pound boxer around. When the longest nine minutes of his life were up, Stafford writes, “I leant against the ropes to support my battered body. Mario jumped into the ring and wiped the blood away from my face.. Roy ambled over and we hugged.

Just for a second, there was a look of respect on the man’s face. Ian Stafford spent a year persuading some of the world’s best sportsmen to allow him to train and compete with them. This is for every reader, perhaps, as it is peppered with footnotes and quotations, but it is an important addition to garden-history scholarship.I wonder what Pope, with his Grotto at Twickenham, would have made of some of the gardens illustrated in Gardens of Obsession, subtitled “Eccentric and Extravagant Visions”, by Gordon Taylor and Guy Cooper (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pounds 25). And who better to describe his life and explore his influence than Mavis Batey, president of the Garden History Society and author of a number of books, including the delightful Jane Austen and the English Landscape? In Alexander Pope, the Poet and the Landscape (Barn Elms, pounds 25), she explains how his “sensibility to landscape and pastoral poetry” affected his contemporaries and set the cultural tone. “Consult the Genius of the Place in all” and “In all let Nature never be forgot” are words that have resonated down the years since the early 18th century. Lionised in his lifetime and acknowledged as one of the champions of landscape gardening, Pope rates scarcely a passing thought from garden-lovers now.

This is not surprising, since we no longer speak the lingo of classical myth and literature, think Arcadia might be a pop group and would rather our theories on garden design were not served up in an elaborate dish of literary and philosophical allusion.Nevertheless, if we are fully to understand early-18th-century gardens, such as Stowe, Rousham, Chiswick and Claremont, and the influences working on Charles Bridgeman and William Kent, in particular, we need to know something of Pope. The book is in three parts: “fusion” (where he sets out his vision for gardens); “realisation”, how he sets about designing a garden in the contemporary style, with examples and plans; and a directory of “hard” and “soft” features, including a list of 100 key plants, the latter rather spoilt by too-small pictures.
In the course of the book, he examines a number of different contemporary approaches to garden design, in particular “minimalism”, which is, of course, influenced by traditional Japanese gardens, but is also an appropriate response to the terrible complexities of our lives. The economy has failed to take off and unemployment is around 20 per cent. Privatisation largely meant handing state assets to friends of the ruling party. They are occasionally exasperating, sometimes exhilarating, and always imaginative. Mr Woodhams says he is influenced by the past, but he is certainly not enslaved by it; he has, for example, wholeheartedly embraced industrial materials in the garden. This book will, I suspect, appeal most to those making a garden in an urban or strongly architectural situation.