'This vast attic of a book is the strangest, funniest, and most consoling work I know. It's the last full expression of the pre-modern world, a compendium of bizarre anecdotes, rough wisdom, and sardonic commentary.'
Philip Pullman 'Burton's kaleidoscopic seventeenth century compendium of history, folklore, medicine, magic, theology, food, astrology and love. The range of his knowledge is staggering.'
Hugh Whitemore The Guardian, 27 March 2004
Burton's 17th-century door-stopper, as has often been noted, is more like an anatomy of everything, a tour round all the passageways and nooks of a feverishly curious mind, a life's work of ransacking and digression; but, as Kevin Jackson notes in his excellent introduction, the whole thing is so forbiddingly large that it can be hard to pluck up the courage to begin it in the first place. Hence this slim selection, including the famous imaginative tourism of the 'digression of the Air' and the hilarious catalogue of doltishness in 'On the Decline of Academic Standards'; the wonderfully compact paean to the sublimity of tobacco; and the maniacal thesaurus of physical imperfection in 'On Ugly Women'. Selecting a 'greatest hits' from a large book may in some instances abuse the source, but the entire Anatomy is already both an enactment of and a balm for some kind of early modern version of attention-deficit disorder.
