Culture

Authors: John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
Publisher: Faber and Faber
4/5

QI (Quite Interesting), now in its seventh series, is a panel quiz show with a twist. The “bantermeister” guests, most of whom you’ll be familiar with if you’re a fan of British comedy, attempt to show off how very brainy they are by answering questions that are either a) ridiculously obscure or b) deliberately designed to fool them into giving an apparently obvious, but incorrect answer. This noticeably stouter Book of General Ignorance brings together the facts behind that second type of question, with a foreword by QI presenter Stephen Fry and four words by hapless permanent bantermeister Alan Davies.
The Book of General Ignorance (The Noticeably etc.) is a fantastic book for two reasons. The first reason is its content. The whole point of this book is to expose the amount of “general knowledge” that is actually just rubbish and not true at all, which is a step up from the regular sort of trivia book that just flails around trying to be exciting. The second involves the potential for application of these revelations. With this book in hand, you, too, can amaze your friends and family by wittily exposing their understanding of history, science, and so forth to be built on a foundation of lies!
That all said, this book does have one big failing. Noticeably stouter than the first edition though it may be, the fact remains that this is a book which collects together information from another, readily available (hello YouTube, hello DVDs) and highly entertaining production, and doesn’t add a whole lot to it. Your erudite proclamations on whether or not Catherine the Great really did die while fucking a horse will be not quite so interesting to friends who have already watched that particular episode, and let’s face it – if it’s a choice between listening to you or the cream of British comedy talk about fatal bestiality, your nearest and dearest are going to go for the DVD.