An enormous and weighty doorstop of a book, covering humour in the English-speaking world with extracts from various novels, plays, short stories, non-fiction etc. These extracts cover some 500 years of writing, and what really astonished me was how much humour changed over the centuries. I am prepared to believe that the contemporaries of the writers included found them highly amusing, but for my own part giant swathes of this book were deeply, painfully unfunny. (On the bright side, this meant some of the actually funny stood out all the more - I choked with laughter at the Lawrence Durrell section, for instance.) In general things improved as time went on, but give me Bill Bryson any day.