I Told You I Was Sick is a selection of mostly comic epitaphs and some that are not comic at all - though they might well be called curious. As such, it continues the centuries old custom of collecting epitaphs, but with rather more attempt at accuracy of transcription and location and context.

The latest title in the Weidenfeld & Nicolson small-format humour series, I Told You I Was SIck includes 150 epitaphs, each of them explained and located. The epitaphs include that of Keith Woodward, a publican of Shrivenham, Wiltshire, whose dying wish was to have inscribed on his tombstone the words 'I told them I was ill'.) Parish councillors later ordered the message removed.)

This 'nice derangement of epitaphs' (as Mrs Malaprop so splendidly remarked in Sheridan's The Rivals), will make the perfect Christmas stocking-filler.