How to Win Enemies

INSULTS -- Edifed by Max Herzberg --Greystone ($2).

Reading this "practical anthology of scathing remarks" is somewhat like sampling a vial of concentrated formic acid: only professional scorpions or the very insensitive will care for more than small sips.

Editor Herzberg's insulters extend in time from Job to Dorothy Parker, are grouped under such headings as Kings and Presidents, Scarified Statesmen; Scorched Politicos; Spite and Wit Among the Great; Whistlerisms; Sarcasm by Mail, Wire, and Cable. Some of the best:

> Edmund Burke (on hearing from William Pitt that "this country and its constitution are safe to the Day of Judgment") : "It's the day of no judgment that I am afraid of."

> Benjamin Disraeli (on hearing from William Ewart Gladstone that "you will come to your end either upon the gallows or of a venereal disease"): "I should say, Mr. Gladstone, that depends upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

> Lord Birkenhead on Sir Samuel Hoare : "The trouble with Sam is that he is descended from a long line of maiden aunts."

> Winston Churchill on Stanley Baldwin: "Stanley occasionally stumbles over the truth, but he always hastily picks himself up and hurries on as if nothing had happened."

> Swinburne on Emerson: "A gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape, carried at first into notice on the shoulder of Carlyle, who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his own . . . fouling. . . ."

> Tennyson on his poem, Lucretius: "What a mess little Swinburne would have made of this." > Somerset Maugham on "the bitter purgatory" awaiting Henry James in the hereafter: "Poor Henry, he's spending eternity wandering round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to peep over and they're having tea just too far off for him to hear what the countess is saying."

> Equally gloomy was an anonymous friend's picture of the future state of pontifical Matthew Arnold: "Poor Matthew," he said after Arnold's death, "he won't like God."

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