HISTORY HIT MISCELLANY OF FACTS, FIGURES & FASCINATING FINDS

'History is a bottomless reservoir of all the bonkers, heroic, awful and weird things we eccentric humans have ever done.' - Dan Snow. The popular historian is intrigued by stumbling across characters like Roland the Farter, whose particular talent for farting on demand won him the patronage of Henry II, or the High Priestess in the city of Ur, daughter of the king, who wrote beautiful poetry making her possibly the earliest named author in history. He has amassed a mountain of research across different periods and disciplines and is clearly tickled about random facts such as that Hitler, Tito, Stalin and Freud were all living in Vienna in 1913 (not as housemates, obviously). Here are quirky miscellanies with religious reflections, snippets of biblical text, lives of saints and poetry surviving from the early Medieval world, and quick explainers of events like the Hundred Years' War or the Iranian Revolution and charts of figures that surprise and provoke like the number of ships lost by the British to enemy action throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (surprisingly few). And there are extraordinary stories like that of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda who was a Japanese soldier ordered not surrender during the Second World War. So he did not, until 1974. Did you know that the planet Pluto was named by an 11 year old schoolgirl who won the naming competition or that Alan Turing would run the 50 miles from Bletchley Park to London if there was an important meeting? Bertha Benz undertook the first long-range car journey in August 1888 to prove her husband's motorcar was roadworthy. Colonel Sourd fought all day on horseback in Waterloo having had his arm amputated without anaesthetic the day before. Dive in and be promiscuous as that is what history is. Packed with fascinating facts and lists, entertaining illustrations. 300pp.