The Most Interesting Book in the World

Edward Brooke-Hitching

$39.99

Hardback

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English

Simon & Schuster
04 December 2024

Reference; General & world history

'Charming, hilarious, and guaranteed to make you the most interesting person at any party. Or the most annoying' - Adam Rutherford

‘Weird and wonderful facts you didn’t know you needed. Full of quirky nuggets of information and trivia’ - Sun

‘Joyously bizarre facts in a new book from a QI brainbox’ - Daily Mail

Drawn from a former BBC QI Elf's lifetime’s search for the weird and the wonderful, The Most Interesting Book in The World is a miscellany of things too strange to be true, yet somehow are.

This remarkable treasury of tales and trivia will whisk you on a jaw-dropping journey through time and space, stopping off to marvel at only the obscure, the startling and the straight-up weird.

In it, Edward Brooke-Hitching considers questions such as:

Why is a cat technically a liquid and a solid?

How did nineteenth-century scientists attempt to signal aliens?

Why did the Dutch once eat their prime minister?

Nowhere else will you find woven together the stories of the religious leader who attempted to build a robot messiah from a dining table, the anti-gravity ‘air-walkers’ of Victorian London, and the pirates who rode sheep; or practical advice for correctly exorcising a house and casting ancient love spells, along with recent scientific discoveries like the mould that can navigate a maze and that humans can glow in the dark.

A unique hybrid of encyclopaedia, trivia and drunken-bar raconteur, all stitched together in one colossal Frankenstein volume packed full of images and photographs - this is the ultimate must-read for anyone looking to tickle the cortex of their curiosity.

By: Edward Brooke-Hitching
Imprint: Simon & Schuster
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 135mm, Spine: 23mm
ISBN: 9781398532373
ISBN 10: 1398532371
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 04 December 2024
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Edward Brooke-Hitching is the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling books The Phantom Atlas (2016), The Golden Atlas (2018), The Sky Atlas (2019), The Madman's Library (2020) and The Devil's Atlas (2021), all of which have been translated into numerous languages; he is also the author of Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports (2015). He is a writer for the BBC series QI. A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and an incurable cartophile, he lives surrounded by dusty heaps of old maps and books in Berkshire.