Ned Sherrin, who died in October, is best remembered as the creator of That Was The Week That Was, the show which kicked off the irreverent 1960s. He compared himself to Sheridan's bitchy man about town, Benjamin Backbite, and accumulated a great hoard of risqué and mildly funny stories over the years.

Voices from the Wings: A Connoisseur's Collection of Great Theatrical and Showbiz Anecdotes (JR Books £16.99) is an enlarged edition of his Theatrical Anecdotes (1991). Shakespeare doesn't have an individual entry, but several "stars of stage and screen" do, and there are sections on ghosts, first nights, child prodigies and memorial services, which Sherrin was the only person in the world to review.

I advise dipping into this thick volume rather than reading all of it. There are lots and lots of "anecdotal gems, witty or malicious putdowns" and "caustic one-liners" from actors and critics, but when you compare them with the words of Dr Johnson and Dorothy Parker, who are here too, you suspect that they won't last.

My favourite entry is a verse by Guy Boas: "I dreamt last night that Shakespeare's Ghost/ Sat for a Civil Service post;/ The English paper for the year/ Had several questions on King Lear/ Which Shakespeare answered very badly/ Because he hadn't read his Bradley."

Anon is one of our best-loved English authors, and it was a bright idea to collect some of his or her poems in one book, Forever and Anon: A Treasury of Poetry and Prose from the Pen of Author Unknown (JR Books, £12.99). But Gerry Hanson's selection is a very strange one, and I particularly miss the medieval and Scottish ballads which are good enough to have lasted for centuries.

There are some old favourites, like She Was Poor But She Was Honest and The Foggy Foggy Dew, a comic Hymn and Prayer for Civil Servants, and a great many uplifting thoughts set to verse. The lines "For part of us went with you/ The day God called you home" appear, with variations, three times. I could weep when I think of how many marvellous anonymous poems are not here.

Viva la Repartee: Clever Comebacks and Witty Retorts from History's Great Wits and Wordsmiths (JR Books £12.99) is the best of these three books and seriously funny.

Repartee was defined by Mark Twain as "something we think of 24 hours too late", and he himself was a master of the art, which he used to "annoy the arrogant and puncture the pompous". For instance, when "Mr So-and-so and valet" checked in at a hotel just before him, the great author signed himself, "Mark Twain and valise". Beethoven once retorted to "Count von Somebody, land-owner", that he was "Ludwig von Beethoven, brain-owner". Or so it is said.

You can learn here the meaning of the word chiastic (a literary device in which the order of the words is reversed, for example, "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me") and find literally hundreds of witty remarks. Some of them are inadvertent, as in: "The doctors x-rayed my head and found nothing."

Churchill, Gandhi, Lincoln, Shakespeare and Shaw are among the authors chosen by editor Mardy Grothe - but where is G.K. Chesterton?