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.
