Written by the creator of the TV panel game show QI, this is a collection of 1,227 QI Facts, where QI stands for Quite Interesting. I definitely found the facts Quite Interesting. Whether they’ll blow anybody’s socks off is another matter. The facts aren’t sorted into any obvious order, which makes this a great book…
This book has the secondary title ‘A History of the Intellectual and Political Movement’, which sums it up quite nicely. It starts by looking at Communist theory and taught me something in the first few pages. I knew the Ancient Greeks gave us democracy. I didn’t know that they also had the idea of a…
First published in 1889, Three Men in a Boat tells the story of a trip up the Thames from Kingston to Chertsey. It covers the adventures, misadventures and reminiscences of three young men: George, Harris and Jerome, along with some of Jerome’s musings. The story is very much of its time. A lot of the…
Europeans knew little about Africa in 1880. Within 30 years Africa had been explored by Europeans and largely distributed between five countries – United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium. Only Liberia and Ethiopia were unconquered. The Scramble for Africa is the history of those 30 years. The countries involved, particularly the United Kingdom, rationalised…
