Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #235 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-05
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Financial Times
"To impress friends with your cleverness, beg, borrow or buy John Lloyd and John Mitchinson's The Book of General Ignorance, an extraordinary collection of 230 common misperceptions compiled for the BBC panel game QI (Quite Interesting)."

Daily Mail
"Eye-watering, eyebrow-raising, terrific . . . moving slightly faster than your brain does, so that you haven't quite absorbed the full import of one blissful item of trivial information before two or three more come along. Such fine and creative research genuinely deserves to be captured in print."

The Economist
"This book would make even Edison feel small and silly, for it offers answers to questions you never thought to ask or had no need of asking as you already knew, or thought you knew, the answer."

Customer Reviews

fun but tedious at times
This is a fun book to pick up and put down at leisure but it loses something for not being delivered by the dry tones of Stephen Fry. If you are an avid watcher of the series you will have heard most of these entries before but there are still some gems among them. Some of the explanations do go on and there seems to be a fascintaion with space that just doesn't excite me but there were a few chuckles along the way. At the end there is a disclaimer inviting readers to send in alternative answers or explanations which does dilute the whole thing a bit. Good for picking up trivia to delight your mates at the pub.

Not entirely fact...
It's a good book, easy to read, informative and amusing. In fact, it's so informative that one is tempted to learn parts of it as ammunition for showing off how impressively clever you are to your friends; dismissing common knowledge as fiction is a satisfying thing to do. That is, until you come across something that the book claims to be true which you know in fact to be false (or more likely, not the entire truth). And by "know" I mean parts that cross over with my degree and which I have studied actual research journals on. Once I realised that the book takes liberties for the sake of sounding a bit impressive and sensational, I lost faith in pretty much everything else it claimed to be true. I'm sure alot of it is genuine, but how do you know which bits? And if it's not necessarily true, where's the fun in knowing it?

Intrestingly fastinating
Having never seen an episode of QI, I was unsure what to expect from this book however i was not disappointed. It is a very readable and fascinating book showing you just how many things you think you know are wrong. I enjoyed reading it and read it over the weekend but my friends and relatives enjoyed it less so as i quizzed them, knowing they would get the answers wrong. A very interesting read for anyone wishing to extend their general knowledge.