Ratcliffe Susan. People on People. The Oxford Dictionary of Biographical Quotations

Oxford University Press, 2001, 494 p.‘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. ’
As Francis Ford Coppola says, ‘Your work parallels your life, but in
the sense of a glass full of water where people look at it and say, Oh
the water’s the same shape as the glass! ’. This book concentrates on
the lives and personalities, but in many cases the links are such that a
comment on the work may also illuminate the person. Pete Townsend
says ‘It’s the most psychedelic experience I ever had, going to see
Hendrix play. When he started to play, something changed: colours
changed, everything changed’, while Henry Moore tells us ‘The first
hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation’.
It is in general true that what people have to say about others can be
very revealing of themselves. Wilhelm II’s comment ‘The machine is
running away with him as it ran away with me’ tells us as much about
the Kaiser’s perception of his own experience as it does of Hitler. John
Gielgud’s tactless remark to Elizabeth Taylor ‘I don’t know what’s
happened to Richard Burton. I think he married some terrible film
star and had to live abroad’ is another instance. Yves Saint Laurent’s
comparison of his own creativity with that of Proust communicates as
much about Saint Laurent as about Proust. Indeed, a self-image can
often be illuminating, and assessments of people by themselves are
frequently included: Sigmund Freud describes himself as ‘nothing but
a conquistador’, while Margaret Thatcher is ‘extraordinarily patient,
provided I get my own way in the end’, and A. E. Housman thinks that
his ‘photograph is not quite true to my own notion of my gentleness
and sweetness of nature, but neither perhaps is my external
appearance’.
Straightforward remarks along the lines ‘So-and-so is the best artist
(or musician, or tennis player)’ have been excluded, except where the
speaker or context gives the remark more interest. So the selfproclaimed
‘greatest’ Muhammed Ali’s comment on Joe Louis ‘I just
give lip service to being the greatest. He was the greatest’ is included.
Likewise, Elizabeth Hurley’s apparently banal comment on Anna
Kournikova ‘She is a very pretty girl’ is given point by its relationship
to Kournikova’s description of Hurley ‘She’s sooo ugly’.
The people talking and talked about include philosophers,
sportsmen, scientists, dancers, musicians, writers, politicians, actors,
and those famous simply for being celebrities. Major figures have long
entries reflecting the influence they continue to exert, with
comments from contemporaries to the present day: from Ben Jonson
to Richard Eyre on Shakespeare, from Voltaire to Einstein on Newton,
and from Mozart to Ringo Starr on Beethoven. However, the length of
entries varies from a single quotation to a whole spectrum of
viewpoints, and the number of comments does not always reflect the
relative importance of the subject. Some people seem to attract notice
much more than others, perhaps because of their personalities or
situations. Thus two princesses with marital difficulties have
numerous supporters and detractors among their contemporaries.
On Caroline of Brunswick, Jane Austen’s view ‘Poor woman, I shall
support her as long as I can, because she is a woman and because I
hate her husband’ is opposed by the the Duke of Wellington, forced to
cheer by a mob, ‘God save the Queen, and may all your wives be like
her! ’, while two hundred years later Diana, Princess of Wales, is
variously described as ‘the people’s princess’ and ‘a silly Sloane
turned secular saint’.
Most of the quotations can stand alone, but occasionally one
quotation is directly linked to another: sometimes a personal
response such as Neil Kinnock’s reply to Michael Heseltine’s
description of him as ‘Self-appointed king of the gutter of politics’,
‘If I was in the gutter, which I ain’t, he’d still be looking up at me from
the sewer’. Elsewhere, it can be a comment on a comment, such as
Squire’s verse on Einstein ‘In continuation of Pope on Newton’. In
such cases a cross-reference is supplied.
The people talked about range from the medieval scholar Peter
Abelard to the French footballer Zinédine Zidane. Each entry begins
with a short description of the subject, followed by the quotations in
alphabetical order of author. The names of people mentioned in the
biographical descriptions who have their own entries elsewhere in
the book appear in bold type. Brief details of the date of the quotation,
or a source where appropriate, follow the text. Where required,
information on the context of the quotation is also given. Since the
emphasis of the book is on people, the reader has not been burdened
with extensive bibliographic detail. The author index gives brief
biographical details of each author, and provides short context lines
and a finding reference for each of their quotations.