1,227 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off
'I love these books ... the best books ever. Brilliant' Chris Evans
QI is the smartest comedy show on British television, but few people know that we're also a major legal hit in Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Africa and an illegal one on BitTorrent. We also write books and newspaper columns; run some (frankly thriving, if we do say so ourselves) social media pages; and some of us appear on The Zoe Ball Breakfast Showon BBC Radio 2 every week to answer your questions. At the core of what we do is the astonishing fact - painstakingly researched and distilled to a brilliant and shocking clarity. In Einstein's words: 'Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.'
Did you know that:
Cows moo in regional accents.
The entire internet weighs less than a grain of sand.
Tintin is called Tantan in Japanese because TinTin is pronounced 'Chin chin' and means penis.
The water in the mouth of a blue whale weighs more than its body.
Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, it is explicitly illegal in Britain to use a machinegun to kill a hedgehog.
1,227 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off will make you look at the universe (and your socks) in an alarming new way.
John Lloyd has a broadcasting background. As a radio producer he devised The News Quiz and To the Manor Born before moving to television to start Not the Nine O'Clock News, Spitting Image, and Blackadder. If pressed, he'd concur with Heraclitus: 'abundance of knowledge does not teach men to be wise.'
John Mitchinson is from the world of books. The original Marketing Director of Waterstone's, he became Managing Director of Cassell, and now runs Unbound. He's with Einstein: 'There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.'