The Most Interesting Book in the World

(Hardback)

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Description

Drawn from a lifetimes 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.

Written by a former BBC QI Elf turned bestselling author, 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 will consider 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 - this is the ultimate must-read for anyone looking to tickle the cortex of their curiosity.

Author Bio

Edward Brooke-Hitching is the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling booksThePhantom 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 ofFox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports (2015).He isa writer for the BBC series QI.Afellow of the Royal Geographical Society and an incurable cartophile, he lives surrounded by dusty heaps of old maps and books in Berkshire.