Read articles by Susan Ratcliffe and Elizabeth Knowles of Oxford Quotations Dictionaries. To browse the range of quotations dictionaries, visit the AskOxford shop.
Date | Title | Author/Reference |
17/02/2010 |
A look at the difficulties faced by great writers of the past. | Susan Ratcliffe |
21/01/2010 |
What's in a name? Are some better than others? This is a look at quotations on the subject of names and naming. | Susan Ratcliffe | 21/12/2009 |
A look back at some of the memorable and surprising quotes from 2009. | | 20/11/2009 |
A look at some humorous quotes from the world of show business. | Susan Ratcliffe | 18/11/2008 |
Susan Ratcliffe proves that there is something for everyone, about everything, in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. | Susan Ratcliffe | 20/10/2009 |
A fun look at the range of themes to be found in the new Little Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs | Susan Ratcliffe | 11/09/2009 |
Susan Ratcliffe looks at what quotations can mean and how they can be used. | Susan Ratcliffe | 20/08/2009 |
A look at how the English language has, and continues, to challenge us. | Susan Ratcliffe | 21/07/2009 |
English is a language rich in idioms. Susan Ratcliffe takes a look at some that have derived from quotations. | Susan Ratcliffe | 19/06/2009 |
It has been sixty years since the publication of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Take a look at what has been said by and about the author in this 'Quote From...' article. | Susan Ratcliffe | 20/05/2009 |
From Bernstein to Mozart, quotations about music. | Susan Ratcliffe | 21/04/2009 |
An exploration into what has been said about space. | Susan Ratcliffe | 19/03/2009 |
From Henry VIII to the present Queen Elizabeth, Susan Ratcliffe presents quotations from and about British royalty past and present. | | 19/02/2009 |
Susan Ratcliffe takes a look at some famous and interesting quotes that have come from battlefields and conflicts. | Susan Ratcliffe | 20/01/2009 |
To celebrate Burns Night, Susan Ratcliffe takes a look at some of the writings of the famous Scottish poet, Robert Burns. | Susan Ratcliffe | 17/12/2008 |
Susan Ratcliffe takes a look back at memorable quotations from politicians and celebrities in 2008. | | 21/10/2008 |
A look at the wide variety of topics covered by the new Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. | Susan Ratcliffe | 24/09/2008 |
Susan Ratcliffe takes a fun look at what has been said by famous personalities. | Susan Ratcliffe | 19/08/2008 |
The Olympics and beyond... Susan Ratcliffe takes a look at what has been said by sports personalities. | Susan Ratcliffe | 09/07/2008 |
With the ongoing furore about the influence of text spelling on the language, Susan Ratcliffe examines what has been said about linguistic change in the past. | Susan Ratcliffe | 19/06/2008 |
Susan Ratcliffe looks back at some of Britain and Ireland's literary figures quotations. | Susan Ratcliffe
| 08/05/2008 |
Susan Ratcliffe takes a look at some Latin phrases and quotations which still have an influence on English today | Susan Ratcliffe | 17/04/2008 |
OUP launches the beautiful new look for its astonishing Oxford World's Classics series. Have a look at a few launch titles. | Jessica Stone | 27/03/2008 |
As the change to Summer Time approaches, Susan Ratcliffe has a look at what has been said about time. | Susan Ratcliffe | 22/02/2008 |
It is Primary Season, and American politics becomes a quote-factory. AskOxford offers some products from previous presidential races. | Susan Ratcliffe | 24/01/2007 |
A few choice entries from Jeremy Butterfields handy guide to usage. | Jeremy Butterfield | 21/12/2007 |
Simon Christie has a festive look at some of the themes of Christmas, and what has been said about them. | Simon Christie | 29/11/2007 |
Juliet Evans takes us through some of the more interesting truth and law euphemisms | Juliet Evans | 24/10/2007 |
Deborah Cameron's new book aims to debunk the men are from Mars, women are from Venus myth. | Deborah Cameron | 19/09/2007 |
A small collection of the new illustrative quotes in the new Shorter. | Simon Christie | 02/08/2007 |
A mix of modern quotes from Oxford's newest collection | Simon Christie | 10/07/2007 |
Some sporting quotes for Summer 2007 | Simon Christie | 29/06/2007 |
With retirement, a review of a few of Tony Blair's quotations from the past. | Kirsty McHugh | 01/05/2007 |
Views on the balance between originality and plagiarism can be heard through the centuries. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/02/2007 |
"Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room" wrote Wordsworth, and references to the religious life often evoke ideas of solitude and enclosure. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/01/2007 |
A number of Eliot's poems have given us lines and phrases which have become part of the language. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/11/2006 |
"Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese – toasted, mostly" says the marooned Ben Gunn in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and many people have a favourite food. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/10/2006 |
Misquotations are often more than mistakes, and much more interesting. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/09/2006 |
One of the pleasures of proverbs is to see how, in different parts of the world, the same idea may be expressed. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/07/2006 |
Robinson Crusoe was startled to see 'the print of a man's naked foot on the shore', but often it is a sign of animal life that catches the attention. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/06/2006 |
"I am a galley slave to pen and ink" said Honoré de Balzac in 1832, and the effort involved in writing has often been remarked. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/05/2006 |
Gardeners through the ages have left us their advice and comments. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/03/2006 |
The political lexicon, like Noah's Ark, has always been well-stocked with animals. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/02/2006 |
In traditional listings, Pride is the first of the Seven Deadly Sins, but references to pride are not always unfavourable. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/01/2006 |
'If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,' wrote Isaac Newton in a letter to his fellow-scientist Robert Hooke, but for many people, it was Newton himself who was the giant. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/12/2005 |
The new serialization of Bleak House can remind us again of the quotations and allusions that Dickens, in this book, has given to the language. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/11/2005 |
We take it for granted now that the study of fossils is a serious occupation, but as Leslie Stephen noted in his Alexander Pope in 1880, it was not always so... | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/10/2005 |
".The photographer," said George Bernard Shaw in 1904, "is like the cod which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity." | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/09/2005 |
The mask of comedy is one of the traditional symbols of the theatre, and the theatrical world has always offered a wide range of wry and witty quotations. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/08/2005 |
"P. G. Wodehouse's comment that "It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine" is well known; less familiar may be the comment by the 19th-century Scottish critic Christopher North... | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/07/2005 |
"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading", said the essayist and critic Logan Pearsall Smith, and the pleasure of reading has been much celebrated. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/06/2005 |
"Poets that lasting marble seek Must carve in Latin or in Greek", wrote the English poet, Edmund Waller, in 1645, and the languages and culture of the classical world have been long admired. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/05/2005 |
"An election is coming," wrote George Eliot, in her mid-19th-century novel Felix Holt, adding dryly, "Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry." | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/04/2005 |
To celebrate the publication of John Emsley's Elements of Murder: A History of Poison, Elizabeth Knowles draws on the words of Shelley, Nabokov, and Hitchcock to reveal the best quotations on this grim subject. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/03/2005 |
"I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark" asserted Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on his plans to set up a joint chemistry laboratory in the Lake District with his fellow poet Wordsworth, and Sir Humphry Davy. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/02/2005 |
"America is given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women" complained Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1854, a comment that adds considerable point to Charlotte Brontë's wry remark of four years earlier, "I wish critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman." | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/01/2005 |
A year's collection of sayings which have (however briefly) caught the public consciousness will range from the serious to the frivolous, and it is notoriously difficult to predict which will last... | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/11/2004 |
In ancient China, the philosopher Zhuangzi wrote that "The mind of the perfect man is like a mirror. It does not lean forward or backward in its response to things. It responds to things but conceals nothing of its own." | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/10/2004 |
"A rose by any other name will smell as sweet", according to Shakespeare, and a traditional adage asserts that while "sticks and stones may break my bones, names will never hurt me". | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/09/2004 |
One of the continuing delights of quotations is to discover how they link people across the years, sometimes with surprising effect. | Elizabeth Knowles | 08/08/2004 |
Robert Browning's Pied Piper used music to charm rats out of Hamelin and into the River Weser, but according to an early legend Ireland was freed from them by the power of rhyme. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/07/2004 |
The "flood-tide of chivalry", as Stephen Leacock put it, is generally seen as something which has passed. Nevertheless, the traditional figure of the knight still conjures up the chivalric ideal. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/06/2004 |
Cosmetics have been with us for a long time (the Bible tells us that the wicked Queen Jezebel "painted her face, and tired her hair")...what may be less well-known is the precise nature of some of the beauty products on record. | Elizabeth Knowles | 04/05/2004 |
The chopping French we do not understand," says the Duchess of York
in Shakespeare's Richard II, and there are other passages in the play indicating
an unwillingness to engage with another language. | Elizabeth Knowles | 30/03/2004 |
"What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?" asked the wit and cleric Sydney Smith in 1835... | Elizabeth Knowles | 26/02/2004 |
The motto of the Boy Scout movement is said to have been based on the initials
of its founder, Robert Baden-Powell, who became a national hero after the relief
of the besieged garrison at Mafeking in the Boer War. | Elizabeth Knowles | 29/01/2004 |
"Just when we thought it was safe to go back in the water, the sharks
are circling again," said a British Cabinet Minister, resignedly surveying
further debate on Europe. | Elizabeth Knowles | |
"Fantastic! and it was all written with a feather!," as Sam Goldwyn
is supposed to have said about Shakespeare. In his own time, Ben Jonson addressed
his fellow-dramatist as "Sweet Swan of Avon", but not all contemporaries
felt so warmly. | Elizabeth Knowles | 05/12/2003 |
"Christmas won't be Christmas
without any presents," runs the heartfelt opening of Louisa Alcott's Little
Women, but presents are not always welcomed unreservedly. | | 31/10/2003 |
"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/10/2003 |
Exploration has always been associated with the unknown and possibly dangerous, and here be dragons was a traditional indication by early map-makers that a region was unexplored and might hold terrors. | Elizabeth Knowles | 05/09/2003 |
"Discretion", said Lytton Strachey, "is not the better part of biography." | Elizabeth Knowles | 06/08/2003 |
| | 16/07/2003 |
"Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war" said Shakespeare's Mark Antony, | Elizabeth Knowles | 07/05/2003 |
"It is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar," said the American writer Henry David Thoreau in 1854, and views on travel and travelling have varied down the years. | Elizabeth Knowles | 11/03/2003 |
P. G. Wodehouse's reference to "excellent browsing and sluicing" suggests a diet not wholly in accord with ingredients approved by the Oxford Book of Health Foods, | Elizabeth Knowles | 10/02/2003 |
Ian Hargreaves' Journalism Truth or Dare looks at journalism today, but what do quotations from earlier centuries say about the press? | Elizabeth Knowles | 30/12/2002 |
Abraham Lincoln, "the prairie-lawyer, master of us all " as the American poet Vachel Lindsay described him, is perhaps one of the most quoted and iconic American presidents. | Elizabeth Knowles | 29/11/2002 |
News of the latest blockbuster movies, from James Bond (with his vodka martinis "Shaken and not stirred") and Harry Potter to Aragorn and the Ents |
Elizabeth Knowles
| 04/11/2002 |
"There's a cool web of language winds us in," says the poet Robert Graves. Some of the strongest threads of this web are found in our stock of figurative language, in the links between proverbs, phrases, and quotations. | Elizabeth Knowles | 01/10/2002 |
21 October is Trafalgar Day, the anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar, 1805, in which a British fleet defeated the combined fleets of France and Spain, and Admiral Nelson was killed. Trafalgar, and Nelson, caught the public imagination | Elizabeth Knowles | 10/09/2002 |
"There is reason in the roasting of eggs", says the proverb (meaning that however odd an action may seem, there is a reason for it). What other notable views of eggs can be found? | Elizabeth Knowles | 12/08/2002 |
In 1997, on hearing that British
scientists had successfully cloned a lamb, Dolly, the American
politician John Marchi said 'We ought not to permit a cottage industry in the
God business'. | | 09/07/2002 |
Many of the most striking Scottish quotations, however, are political. In the 14th century the Scottish Parliament, asserting the independence of Scotland, said in the Declaration of Arbroath that, "It is not glory, it is not riches, neither is it honour, but it is freedom alone that we fight and contend for, which no honest man will lose but with his life." | Elizabeth Knowles | 29/05/2002 |
In the month of the Queen's Golden Jubilee we allow kings (and queens) to speak themselves as we listen to the voices of earlier sovereigns and their families ... | Elizabeth Knowles | 18/05/2002 |
The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon, explains of his Memoirs that, "all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language." The 19th-century German soldier and statesman Field-Marshal Moltke is described as being "silent in seven languages," | Elizabeth Knowles | 04/05/2002 |
Publication of John Gross's anthology After Shakespeare is a timely reminder in Shakespeare's birthday month of his substantial contribution to our language. | Elizabeth Knowles | 20/03/2002 |
"March", according to the proverb, "comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb", but what are its other proverbial associations? | Elizabeth Knowles | 13/02/2002 |
An intentional quotation from a writer or speaker is often prefaced with the words "as X says", but we often quote without realizing it. | Elizabeth Knowles | 11/01/2002 |
In the UK, the New Year Honours List is one of the milestones marking the turn of the year. "This is the stuff that all of our childhood fantasies come from. | Elizabeth Knowles | 05/12/2001 |
In 1897, eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote to the editor of the New York Sun", to ask if it were true that, as some of her friends were saying, there was no Santa Claus. | Elizabeth Knowles | 07/11/2001 |
Quotations, like biographies, often shed light on particular worlds - theatre, literature, politics. Noel Coward provided a deceptively simple account of what an actor has to do: ‘Just say the lines and don't trip over the furniture’ . | Elizabeth Knowles | 12/10/2001 |
'We are not amused' said Queen Victoria, repressively. As we publish the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, it is an appropriate moment to look at varying views of humour across the ages. | Elizabeth Knowles | 14/09/2001 |
In the language of quotations, some months have a strong identity - 'the
merry month of May', for example, in the traditional ballad of "Barbara Allen".
| Elizabeth Knowles | 09/08/2001 |
2001 is the diamond jubilee for Oxford Quotations: it is 60 years since the first edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was published in 1941. What have the main changes been? | Elizabeth Knowles | 11/07/2001 |
'Personally, I have always looked on cricket as organized loafing' said the future Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, in 1925 ... | Elizabeth Knowles | 25/06/2001 |
Anyone for tennis? as a catchphrase typifies the kind of drawing-room comedies in which someone stepped in through the French windows, lightly swinging a racket ... | Elizabeth Knowles | 04/06/2001 |
"Football? It's the beautiful game" said the Brazilian footballer, Pele, and over the years other voices have supported his view.
| Elizabeth Knowles | 01/05/2001 |
In March 1923, in an interview with The New York Times,
the British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount
Everest | Elizabeth Knowles |
