The quirkiest biographical dictionary you’ll ever read from the bestselling QI team, full of hilarious facts and details about the most interesting people who ever lived.

In The Book of the Dead you will meet hundreds of Dead People, some well-known, others completely obscure, organised into 42 short chapters that play merry hell with the usual classifications. So, instead of Royalty, Scientists and Sportsmen, you’ll find rather more diverting categories like:
People who died Penniless
The One-Legged,
Only Children,
People who failed at School,
Those only Remembered by a Single Quotation
and the Last People to Know Everything!
 
Why did a church composer invent the hand grenade? What was Leonardo’s proudest achievement? If The Book of the Dead doesn’t persuade you to immediately join the massed ranks of those looking at the radishes from below, it will certainly make the tricky business of Living a tad less grim and a lot more interesting.

A Dead Interesting Fact! QI books have now sold over 1.5 million copies, and the series has moved to BBC1 in 2009 and gaining an extra 3 million viewers.

‘Even in an age of information overload, we love books which take us on paths through the mad matrix of facts. There’s now an ever-growing abundance of books – usually with a question-mark in their title – like Does Anything Eat Wasps? Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? Do Fish Drink Water? Do Penguins’ Feet Freeze? Do Sheep Shrink in the Rain? What Makes Flamingoes Pink? John Lloyd, starting QI in 2000, got there before any of them’ David Robinson, Scotsman

About the authors: John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, supported by a crack research squad of QI elves, are the team behind the BBC One show QI (Quite Interesting), and the authors of The Book of General Ignorance, which has sold in 24 countries. QI is the brainchild of John Lloyd, award-winning producer of Not the Nine O’clock News, Spitting Image and Blackadder, and of the forthcoming online comedy channel Comedybox.
John Mitchinson is QI’s Director of Research and drinks in the same pub as John Lloyd.

Which quite famous dead person are you?

Take this mind expanding quiz to find out www.qibooks.co.uk

By John Lloyd & John Mitchinson
22 October 2009, £16.99 hardback

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