QI: The Book of the Dead

John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571255559
• Year: 2009

Welcome to QI: The Book of the Dead, a biographical dictionary with a twist - one where only the most interesting people made it in!QI have got together six dozen of the happiest, saddest, maddest and most successful men and women from history. Celebrate their wisdom, learn from their mistakes and marvel at their bad taste in clothes.

Hans Christian Anderson was terrified of naked women, Florence Nightingale spent her last fifty years in bed, Sigmund Freud smoked twenty cigars a day, Catherine de Medici applied a daily face mask made of pigeon dung, Rembrandt van Rijn died penniless and Madame Mao banned cicadas, rustling noises and pianos.

Carefully collected and ordered by the QI team into themed chapters with thought-provoking titles such as 'There's Nothing Like a Bad Start in Life', 'Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone'. Each chapter reveals hilarious insights into the true nature of the most interesting people who ever lived, including Isaac Newton, Genghis Khan, Sigmund Freud, Florence Nightingale and Karl Marx.

From the bestselling authors of The Book of General Ignorance and 1,277 Facts to Knock Your Socks Off, comes a fun and inspirational biographical dictionary, with motivational stories about the famous and the obscure.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction John Lloyd
• Prologue John Mitchinson
• 1: There’s Nothing like a Bad Start in Life
• 2: Happy-go-lucky
• 3: Driven
• 4: Let’s Do It
• 5: Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone
• 6: Grin and Bear It
• 7: The Monkey-keepers
• 8: Who Do You Think You Are?
• 9: Once You’re Dead, You’re Made for Life
• 10: Is That All There Is?
• Further Reading and Acknowledgements
• Index
• About the Authors
• By the Same Authors
• Copyright