Viscount Samuel, Book of Quotations (2nd edn] (London: James Barrie 1954)

Preface records that the author he began when he was eighteen ‘the practice of noting down passages fro whatever books I happened to be reading. No, at over eighty, the collection runs to several thousands. I did this in order to have at hand a record of ideas and phrases which seemed to me noteworthy and to which I might want some day to recur, and not with any thought of publicatin. But it occurred to me a few years ago that other people might be interested in a Book of Quotations made out of this material; so I condensed it by about half, and arranged the entries under suitable headings, with full indexes of subjects and authors.

Note: The book appeared in 1947 (p.v.); ends with dedication to his wife in ‘gratitude for all her labour in copying and preserving, during very many years, those continually accumulating notes, and so providing the material which has been the basis of this collection.’ (p.vi.) [The book was formerly in the possession of Craig McGrath].

Bernard Wasserstein (1992) Herbert Samuel: A Political Life (Oxford: OUP): ‘He liked to think of himself as a modern version of Francis Bacon:  But Samuel was not really a polymath: his analytic intelligence was constrained by a middlebrow aesthetic and by an imagination that [...] seldom rose beyond the pedestrian.’ (Wasserstein 1992: 402). quoted in Finn Fordham [Royal Holloway], ‘Utopia, Palestine, and Partition: Herbert Samuel’s An Unknown Land (1942)’ [draft essay, 2016].)