Linnets fare badly in the seventh edition. We also lose Yeats's "evening full of the linnet's wings" from ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree", Wordsworth's "Come, hear the woodland linnet", Robert Bridges's "I heard a linnet courting", and Lovelace's "When (like committed linnets) I/With shriller throat shall sing", from the same poem as "Stone walls do not a prison make". The only survivor is also from Tennyson: "the linnet born within the cage/That never knew the summer woods." At this rate, by the time of the eighth edition, the last crimson-breasted songster will have flown the brittle cage of memory.

Browning v. Blair 

Knowles's method of saving space is ruthlessly to excise the barely less memorable line or stanza after the famous one. She keeps "They shut the road through the woods/ Seventy years ago." But Kipling, still surely one of England's most popular and by-heart-remembered poets, could not be reduced from over ten pages in the first edition to under four in this, if she had not deprived us of those horsemen in the final verse "steadily cantering through/the misty solitudes" and the shivery pay-off "But there is no road through the woods!"

I'm not really quarrelling with Knowles's deselection technique. She is surely right in seeing ours as a prosier age in which fewer of us have long passages of poetry in our heads. And most of her new entries are exemplary. It is good, for example, to have both the Marilyn Monroe and the Princess Diana versions of "Candle in the Wind", along with nuggets from Lord Spencer's funeral oration. I did not know that it was his mother, rather than Prince Charles, who first coined "monstrous carbuncle". 

This ODQ is, if anything, even more punctilious than its predecessors in tracking down different versions of the same quote; Barack Obama's "the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice" is traced back to Martin Luther King and thence to the early 19th-century Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker. I like too the section devoted to Misquotations, where wrong 'uns such as "Crisis, what crisis?", "Play it again, Sam" and "Hug a hoodie" are put to rights.

Here and there, Knowles's selection tends towards the over-solemn. How many of us remember Tony Blair saying "This is not the time to falter" in the Commons debate on the Iraq war, as opposed to his saying "I'm a pretty straight sort of guy" in the Bernie Ecclestone affair? On the faltering front, surely a better candidate would be Margaret Thatcher's "Don't go wobbly on me, George", to the first President Bush before the first Gulf War. What I remember of Colonel Tim Collins's eve-of-battle address to his troops is not the passage quoted here, but the bit that came immediately after it: "Iraq is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there. You will see things that no man could pay to see."