1000 Years of Laughter

This delightfully entertaining anthology presents some of the funniest extracts in English literature.

It opens with Anglo-Saxon riddles - 'they couldn't keep themselves warm on a diet of Beowulf' - and continues with medieval memories, Tudor comic turns and Restoration buffoonery.

The rise of the novel in the 18th century brought classic humor from Swift, Sterne and Smollett, the mantle then passing to Charles Dickens in the 19th, while in the first half of the 20th century emerged unforgettable comic writers as diverse as Dorothy Parker and P.G.

Wodehouse.