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Very British Problems Abroad by Rob Temple
Meet, if you haven't already, the phenomenon of the Very British Problem. In this format they're in pithy little comments (of, ooh, about 140 characters in length, for some reason…) and detail the minor things in life that we like nothing more than to inflate to a major factor of life. They can involve manners, staring at things until they mend themselves, hitting things ditto, or the fact that nobody apart from you and I know how to queue properly. And if the idea hits the world outside our shores, then – well, you certainly have a book full of content regarding our attitude and ineptitude abroad. Full review...
Divorced, Beheaded, Died...: The History of Britain's Kings and Queens in Bite-Sized Chunks by Kevin Flude
History lives. Proof of that sweeping statement can be had in this book, and in the fact that while it only reached the grand old age of six, it has had the dust brushed off it and has been reprinted – and while the present royal incumbent it ends its main narrative with has not changed, other things have. This has quietly been updated to include the reburial of Richard III in Leicester, and seems to have been rereleased at a perfectly apposite time, as only the week before I write these words the Queen has surpassed all those who came before her as our longest serving ruler. Such details may be trivia to some – especially those of us of a more royalist bent – and important facts to others. The perfect balance of that coupling – trivia and detail – is what makes this book so worthwhile. Full review...
Clever Commuter: Puzzles, Tests and Problems to Solve on Your Journey by Dr Gareth Moore
The week before I reviewed this book I saw a newspaper article that said that so-called brain-training apps are a waste of time, that they merely replace what we should be doing anyway to keep our grey cells active (multi-tasking, observing, REAL LIFE etc). This is the puzzle book version of a brain training app, and so with all those electronic titles on the market it already had opposition, even before that news came in. But let's face it – who on earth would risk the science being wrong on this occasion? Surely this kind of book should be an inherently essential purchase? Full review...
There Are Tittles in This Title: The Weird World of Words by Mitchell Symons
I love spending time with Mitchell Symons books. If you don't know him, he's written this book, that book, and a book actually called This Book and a book actually called That Book. He knows his trivia, he gets a lot of info on the page, and can really come across at the best of times as a convivial host. So pair him, as has happened here, with the weird and wonderful world of words and only great things could be expected. Unfortunately, then, only just above average things were expected. Full review...
An Unkindness of Ravens: A Book of Collective Nouns by Chloe Rhodes
We have all heard of a Pride of Lions, a Herd of Cattle and a Flock of Birds, but what about the less common, long forgotten collective nouns, like: a Bloat of Hippopotami, a Mutation of Thrushes, a Herd of Harlots or a Superfluity of Nuns? If you are interested in the English language and the origin of words, then you will really enjoy browsing this book. Full review...
Who Invented The Stepover? (And Other Crucial Football Conundrums) by Paul Simpson and Uli Hesse
In 1982, second division Charlton Athletic staged an unlikely transfer coup by signing former European Footballer of the Year Allan Simonsen. If the thought of the Danish superstar forsaking the glamour of Barcelona for south east London seemed unlikely then consider that Simonsen had previously faked his own death during a World Cup qualifier. Full review...
Outraged of Tunbridge Wells: Original Complaints from Middle England by Nigel Cawthorne
It was ever thus… cyclists go too fast, without using a hooter or lights; there are hoodlums everywhere one looks, and no public conveniences; people pretend to have qualifications and degrees they haven't rightfully earned; buses are too busy with shopping women who should be indoors already, cooking for their working menfolk… It's a very clever idea to show exactly what is behind the 'disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' tag, and as a book to be shelved alongside those with the wackier letters sent to the Daily Telegraph, these selections from the Royal town's press itself make a great eye-opener to the complaints and complainants of Kent. Full review...
Dedicated to...: The Forgotten Friendships, Hidden Stories and Lost Loves found in Second-hand Books by W B Gooderham
I have found many strange and unusual things in second-hand bookshops. I have done one or two strange and unusual things in them as well, but that's a different story. Twice now I have managed to find a second-hand book, completely signed and dedicated by the author, yet discarded by the recipient, and have been able to present the author with the edition at hand and get it re-dedicated. (If I'm not mistaken, the discarders were a neighbouring babysitter, and a teacher of the author's children.) I'll admit that's rarefied, however, and on the whole the scribble you find in second-hand books is from the person who bought it, and gave it as a gift, not the person who wrote it. But even so, the dedication of the donor can be immensely fascinating and open to all kinds of interpretation, as these examples show perfectly clear. Full review...
The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language by Mark Forsyth
This book just had to be called The Horologicon. Originally it meant a daily diary of devotion for a priest or monk. Our author knows it is a rare word these days and gives it to his modern Book of Hours, which is a guide to similarly obsolete, charming or unusually whimsical words set out, not as others do, as a dictionary, but in essays for every waking hour of the day, and the subject they're most likely to cover. Full review...
Better Than Great by Arthur Plotnik
Better Than Great is a bravura, ingeniously inventive, roaringly intelligent thesaurus of praise and acclaim - oh, momma! Where has this paean-worthy, distressingly excellent book, which certainly goes the whole hog, been all my life? Full review...
Why? by Joel Levy
Why does the Titanic float but a brick sink? And that water they’re sinking or floating in, why is it wet? And what colour is it, ‘cos it ain’t clear? These questions and many more are answered in this book which may not be a new concept but which is executed extremely well. Full review...
Puzzled by David Astle
Words are wonderful enough when they’re just telling you things straight up, but who can resist them when they’re really being playful? Not David Astle, the author of this new title that blows the lid on it all with what he calls 'secrets and clues from a life in words'. Full review...
The Story of English by Joseph Piercy
The Story of English sets out to be a potted history of the influences that have shaped our language, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to LOLcats.com. Starting with the pre-Roman Celts and their Ogham alphabet, it goes crashing through fifteen hundred years of linguistic history at a terrific pace to end with an almost audible sigh of relief at the internet age. Full review...
Write. by Phil Daoust (editor)
The Guardian newspaper has for some years now been publishing articles and interviews on how to write. Successful authors, agents and publishers have offered pearls of wisdom in the Guardian Masterclasses for genres as wide-ranging as travel writing, picture books and screenplays. Now their wisdom and their insights have been collected together in this slim volume which will intrigue both the readers and the writers among us. Full review...
Cliches: Avoid Them Like the Plague by Nigel Fountain
Cliché is such an awful word with all its connotations of the trite, the hackneyed and the overused. It's a word you'd hate to have associated with your writing, even if you produce nothing more public than a shopping list but for the benefit of the discerning reader Nigel Fountain has compiled a list in alphabetical order of these dreaded phrases. I began reading, confident that I couldn't be caught out and then blushed when I realised that I'd just pointed out to someone that avoiding clichés wasn't rocket science. They agreed that it isn't brain surgery either. Full review...
Bright Young Things by Alison Maloney
According to the summary I read of Bright Young Things before choosing the book to read, it 'takes a sweeping look at the changing world of the Jazz Age'. I was expecting it to be something of a narrative account of the Roaring Twenties – in actual fact, it's set out as a collection of trivia about the decade. Similarly, the 'first person accounts' mentioned on the inside front cover are limited to two or three sentence quotes. Full review...
Homework for Grown Ups by E Foley and B Coates
School days can sometimes seem like a very long time ago. You most likely spent 12 to 14 years of early life learning in a classroom, but how much can you remember? Sure, you can count, and you know your alphabet, but all those other lessons you had, how much can you really remember of those? If you want or need to remember back to your school lessons (to help your own children with their homework, to win pub quizzes, whatever the reason) then this book can help. Covering ten subjects from English and Maths to Science, Home Ec and History, it’s a crash course to refresh your knowledge – all those things you kinda know deep down, but at the same time have forgotten at least a little bit. Full review...
The Question Book by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler
Most of us have probably made at least one of those end-of-the-year lists of the best books, albums and parties we have been to in the previous twelve months. But can you, with some effort, locate the one you made in 1987? Have you ever constructed a graph of your ups and downs in a given period, and then decided to expand it by separating emotional, intellectual, sexual and financial aspects and colour coding them? Have you made a list of all your lovers, bosses or friends and then rated them from 1 to 10 on several dimensions each? Do you have one of the books that list 100 things to do before you die or 500 books to read in your life (and ticked off the ones you have done)? Did you ever spend a whole evening and half of a night filling in dubious 'personality' questionnaires on the Internet? Have you ever doodled something, decided that it beautifully expresses the deepest essence of your personality and then proceeded to draw such icons for all your friends? Full review...
Horrid Henry's A - Z of Everything Horrid by Francesca Simon
Francesca Simon's Horrid Henry is a very popular little boy, although you might have a different opinion if you actually had to put up with his antics yourself. A slightly modernised embodiment of 'slugs and snails and puppy dogs' tails' concept of boyhood, Henry is naughtiness personified, combining irreverence for authority with a huge dose of gross-out crude humour that really appeals to the target readership of early primary school children. Add a somewhat nostalgic, timeless feel, trademark alliterations, subtle (and not so subtle) digs at family dynamics, sibling rivalry and particularly at modern middle-class manners and sensibilities and you have a winning character and a base for a very successful edutainment franchise. Full review...
The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth
I like words. Words are awesome. End of. But I also like trivia. I like knowing things that perhaps other people don’t, and helpfully passing on this knowledge to them. So a book about word-related trivia is just a win-win, and this one is so good I think we’ll have to call it a win-win-win. Full review...
Philip Ardagh's Book of Kings, Queens, Emperors and Rotten Wart-Nosed Commoners by Philip Ardagh
If you deem a good children's historical trivia book to be one that tells you, the adult, something they didn't know about historical trivia, then this is a good example. I didn't know George V broke his pelvis when his horse fell on him, startled by some post-WWI huzzahs. I didn't know Charles VI of France nearly got torched in some drunken bacchanal. The length of time Charlemagne sat on a throne (over 400 whole years (even if he wasn't wholly whole all that time)) was news to me, as was the raffle that was held (more or less) for being the unknown soldier. Therefore this is a good book for children and the adults willing to instill some historical trivia into them. Full review...
It Could Have Been Yours: The enlightened person's guide to the year's most desirable things by Jolyon Fenwick and Marcus Husselby
In a world of diamond-encrusted skulls, gold-leafed iPhones and luxury yachts ten a penny, of blingy shit (or should that be shitty bling?) it's a relief to know people are still spending money on unique one-offs that are more worthwhile. The records for costliest photo, artwork, musical instrument and manuscript have all been broken in the twenty four months leading up to this book's release. Our collators have scoured the press for those and other, similarly noteworthy auctions, and found what other people paid for what you didn't know you would have wanted given the money. Full review...
Farmer Buckley's Exploding Trousers by Stephanie Pain
The history of science is filled with many miraculous discoveries. ...It's also filled with exploding trousers, self-experimentation, a coachman's leg that becomes a museum piece and gas-powered radios. Farmer Buckley's Exploding Trousers regales us with fifty odd events on the way to scientific discovery. Part popular science book, part trivia, each article is a treat to read, either as a fun-sized nugget, or when reading from cover to cover. Full review...
42 - Douglas Adams' Amazingly Accurate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything by Peter Gill
A common question about Douglas Adams’ famous Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is just why Adams chose the number 42 as the answer to life, the universe and everything. In a charming trivia book, author Peter Gill takes 50 pages or so to look into the story of the book and the author and another 250 to find occurrences of 42 in the worlds of sport, crime, science and a wide range of other fields. Full review...
I Never Knew That About the River Thames by Christopher Winn
Here are the remains of the building that could be said to have sired two important British royal dynasties. Here is the place of ill-repute, where 'Rule Britannia' was premiered, and which also bizarrely saw a death by cricket ball that inspired the most famous gardens in the world. Here too is the largest lion in the world. To where am I referring? Well the answer is either the Thames valley, or this very book. Full review...
Why Can't Elephants Jump? by Mick O'Hare
Well? Why can't elephants jump? And while you're pondering that, think about why James Bond wanted his martini shaken, not stirred. Why is frozen milk yellow? Does eating bogeys do you any harm? What's the hole for in a ballpoint pen? How long a line could you draw with a single pencil? For answers to all these questions, and so many more, then do yourself a favour and pick up the latest collection from the New Scientist's Last Word column.
Mick O'Hare was also kind enough to be interviewed by Bookbag. Full review...
Wordcatcher: An Odyssey into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words by Phil Cousineau
I formed a new, close friendship recently, and one of the first things I subtly dropped into things was the fact that I might use a different dictionary to other people. Probably there was a subconscious thought forming that it would be better to make it known, in case I trod on any toes, said anything that didn't go down quite as well as I had planned. But that's nothing compared to what Phil Cousineau has done here, for he has written his own dictionary, and got it published in a very nice, glossy, browsable form. Alright, it's nothing like a complete dictionary, but everything is here in his own personal style - 250 main words, definitions, derivations and examples of use. Oh, and some modern-ish artworks as well. Full review...
The Economist Book of Isms by John Andrews
I'm assuming all readers of this book, and this review, will know the meanings of the words racism, atheism and Communism. But how about Orphism? Nestorianism? Vorticism? Or the exact difference between egoism, egotism, and egocentrism? I'll confess to ignorance on all of that second trio of words before reading this book, but was fascinated to find out what they were. (Orphism is a religion originating in 6th or 7th century BC Greece based on the poems of Orpheus, who returned from Hades. I'll leave you to find out the definitions of the other two yourself!) Similarly, I was aware of all three of that final trilogy, but am not sure I even knew there was a difference, let alone that I'd have come close to being able to actually define them all as this volume does. Full review...
How to Talk Like a Local: From Cockney to Geordie, a National Companion by Susie Dent
Meeting a grammersow in a netty is more common than you might think - I'd put my revits on it. Having a neb around these pages I can find many different ways of saying the above, as well - or should that be boco ways. But before this review comes out as complete cag-mag, I'd better say this book is just as you'd expect - an amenable, approachable but intelligent look at regional idiom and slang, in A-Z dictionary form. Full review...
Number Freak: A Mathematical Compendium from 1 to 200 by Derrick Niederman
This is a book that definitely does what it says on the tin. Our author has the capacity to grab each number between one and two hundred, and wring it for all its worth - all the special status it might have in our culture (more easy with seven than, say, 187), all the special properties it might possess (perfect, triangular, prime), and as many other things mathematicians and so on would find of interest. Luckily there is enough here to make the book well worth a browse for us who would not deem themselves number buffs. Full review...
More Brilliant Answers by AQA 63336
If you've got a question you can text those nice people at AQA 63336 and they'll do their best to provide you with a prompt and accurate answer. Over the last five years they've answered some twenty million questions and each autumn they publish a book with the best and most interesting of the year's answers. There's some fun to be had in this year's book. Full review...
A Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases by Tad Tuleja
Take a look at the cover design of this book, and you'd be mistaken for thinking this was a trivia compendium for all those foreign words that have taken part in our English language since whenever they crossed over from their original homes. But the title is definitely honest, for this is a dictionary book first, for reference, and a browser for the trivia buff second. Full review...
Don't Swallow Your Gum by Dr Aaron Carroll and Dr Rachel Vreeman
BANG. That's the sound of copious urban myths being shot down. BANG. That's the sound of the old wives slamming the door, as their tales get revealed as baseless. CLICK. That's the noise lots of ill-informed websites make as they get closed down. All noises come due to this brilliant book. Full review...
Eye Spy: Uncovering the Secrets of the World Around You by Justin Scroggie
Signs are everywhere. I wasn't really one of those who thought our roads were littered with too many traffic signs until the day I was driven past a pair of speed regulation signs, positioned at the exit end of a one-way street but facing the illegal way up it. Not all signs, of course, are quite as unnecessary, or indeed as blatantly visible, which is where this pictorial guide to countless coded messages, signifiers and other similar factoids comes in. Full review...
Where Are They Now? - Rediscovering Over 100 Football Stars of the 70s and 80s by Matt Allen
This looks like some people's worst idea of a book, ever. Trivia, nostalgia, football, and lists - does it get more masculine? There's not a female in sight, either, as we get 101 portraits of footballers from times past, and most importantly, a summary of their career since hanging up the boots in the professional game. Full review...
Philip Ardagh's Book of Howlers, Blunders and Random Mistakery by Philip Ardagh
There's nought so queer as folk. From the idiot who broke into a car without realising his name and date of birth were clearly seen on his tattoo on CCTV, to the people who ordered someone to paint clothes on all the people in the Sistine Chapel - before others came along who decided the original had been better, and the people who dismissed The Beatles as never likely to make a name for themselves. We have long been a race of idiots. Full review...