This fabulously entertaining collection gathers for the first time the wittiest, the most illuminating, the most entertaining - simply the best - writing about this most social of rituals, from over 200 writers, including Truman Capote, Martin Amis, Daphne DuMaurier, Horace, Noel Coward, Edith Wharton, Tom Wolfe, Shakespeare, Colette, Vladimir Nabokov, Muriel Spark, James Thurber, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Bible, Dorothy Parker, Dominick Dunne and many more.