The New Yorker - May 12/19, 2025

Overview: The New Yorker, American weekly magazine, famous for its varied literary fare and humour.

The Most Interesting Book in the World: A Miscellany of Things Too Strange to Be True, Yet Somehow Are

2024 | Education & Reference

Drawn from a lifetime’s search for the weird and the wonderful, The Most Interesting Book in The World is a miscellany of things too strange to be true, yet somehow are.

Written by a former BBC QI Elf turned bestselling author, this remarkable treasury of tales and trivia will whisk you on a jaw-dropping journey through time and space, stopping off to marvel at only the obscure, the startling and the straight-up weird.

In it, Edward Brooke-Hitching considers questions such as:
• Why is a cat technically a liquid and a solid?
• How did nineteenth-century scientists attempt to signal aliens?
• Why did the Dutch once eat their prime minister?

Nowhere else will you find woven together the stories of the religious leader who attempted to build a robot messiah from a dining table, the anti-gravity ‘air-walkers’ of Victorian London, and the pirates who rode sheep; or practical advice for correctly exorcising a house and casting ancient love spells, along with recent scientific discoveries like the mould that can navigate a maze and that humans can glow in the dark.

A unique hybrid of encyclopaedia, trivia and drunken-bar raconteur, all stitched together in one colossal Frankenstein volume packed full of images and photographs – this is the ultimate must-read for anyone looking to tickle the cortex of their curiosity.