Anyone who listened to BBC radio broadcasts from the 1950s to the 1980s should remember the popular game show My Word. The last segment of the show featured the two team captains, Denis Norden and Frank Muir, competing to tell the best story that would explain, and end with, a famous phrase or quotation supplied by the game show host. Listeners delighted in the anticipation of the catchphrase, for as the clock ran down, it seemed that the phrase became more and more incompatible with the story unfolding. Norden and Muir endeavoured to outdo each other’s displays of erudition, constrained by the generic requirements of the show’s format, the imposed time limit on their story’s length, and the need for the story to end with the supplied quotation. Such competitive composition, or ‘poetic jousting’ as Yolanda Plumley terms it, between medieval poets and composers, is at the centre of her new book on fourteenth-century song, The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut. In it, through a virtuosic display that traverses almost a century of song, and considers almost 350 works (as listed in the ‘Index of Lyric Compositions’ at the end of the book), Plumley examines the circumstances in which, and the processes by which, fourteenth-century faiseurs plucked material from other contexts and ‘grafted’ it – to use Plumley’s horticultural metaphor, derived from the French verb enter(p. 10) – into new works.