Raise Your Glasses: The Best and Wittiest Anecdotes and After-dinner Stories from the Famous

Collections of after-dinner anecdotes are one of those categories of book for which seem to have no real reason for existing. However, since Raise Your Glasses is published for the benefit of the Children's Cancer Ward at Bart's Hospital, London, and has been reprinted six times since 1988, it is obviously an entirely useful and delightful volume. In this sequel to My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, Phyllis Shindler has collected jokes and anecdotes from the great and the good, the famous and (in some cases) the now-dead. A number are in doubtful taste (nothing wrong with that) and a few are either baffling or just plain not funny (stepforward, Wendy Craig and Katie Boyle), but there are some good lines here. Sickert to a departing friend: "Come again when you can't stay so long." The Victorian judge on the three categories of evidence-givers: "The liar, the damned liar and the first-rate witness." The Indonesian cruise steward sniping at a colleague: "You eat like a passenger." And so on. If there is anybody out there reading this who still makes after-dinner speeches that require the surgical insertion of jokes, this is the book for them. --Robin Davidson