Looks at the lives and achievements of thousands of composers and examines key topics such as music history, theory, and jargon.

The New Penguin Dictionary of Music is the essential A-Z of some 1,000 years of Western music. It explores in detail the lives and achievements of a huge range of composers, and examines such key topics as music history (from medieval plainchant to contemporary minimalism), performers, theory and jargon. Written by an award-winning music critic, and blending scholarship with personal insight and opinion, this dictionary is both a pleasurable read and an invaluable and authoritative reference book for all lovers of music, whether amateur or professional.

The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations contains over 8,000 quotations from 1914 to the present. As much a companion to the modern age as it is an entertaining and useful reference tool, it takes the reader on a tour of the wit and wisdom of the great and the good, from Margot Asquith to Monica Lewinsky, from George V to Boutros Boutros-Galli and Jonathan Aitken to Frank Zappa.