John Mitchinson - The Book of the Dead

Sir Jeffrey Hudson

Nick Page, Lord Minimus: The Extraordinary Life of Britain’s Smallest Man (St. Martin’s Press, 2002)

Rembrandt van Rijn

Charles Fowkes, The Life of Rembrandt (London, 1978)

Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt’s Universe (Thames & Hudson, 2006)

Frida Kahlo

Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (Harper & Row, 1983)

Andrea Kettenmann, Frida Kahlo, 1907–1954: Pain and Passion (Taschen, 2000)

Madame Mao

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape, 2005)

Ross Terrill, Madame Mao: The White-boned Demon (Stanford UP, 1999)

Frank Buckland

G. Frank Buckland, Curiosities of Natural History (London, 1859)

Frank Buckland, Curious Men (MacSweeneys, 2008)

H. O. Burgess, Curious Ark: The Curious World of Frank Buckland (New York, 1967)

King Alexander I of Greece

John Van der Kiste, Kings of the Hellenes: The Greek Kings, 1863–1974 (Alan Sutton, 1994)

Titus Oates

John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (Heinemann, 1972)

Alessandro, Count Cagliostro

Philippa Faulks and Robert D. L. Cooper, The Masonic Magician: The Life and Death of Count Cagliostro and his Egyptian Rite (Watkins, 2008)

Iain McCalman, The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro (Random House, 2004)

George Psalmanazar

Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Wayne State University Press, 2001)

Princess Caraboo

Jennifer Raison and Michael Goldie, Caraboo: The Servant Girl Princess (Windrush, 1994)

Louis de Rougemont

Louis de Rougemont, The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (Dodo Press, 2009)

James Barry

Rachel Holmes, Scanty Particulars: The Life of Dr. James Barry (Viking, 2002)

Ignácz Trebitsch Lincoln

Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (Yale, 1988)

Tuesday Lobsang Rampa

T. Lobsang Rampa, Living with the Lama (Random House, 1964)

T. Lobsang Rampa, The Third Eye (Random House, 1956)

Sheelagh Rouse, Twenty-Five Years with T. Lobsang Rampa (Lulu.com, 2006)

Archibald Belaney

Lovat Dickson, Wilderness Man: The Amazing True Story of Grey Owl , new ed. (Pocket Books, 1999)

Armand G. Ruffo, Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney (Coteau Books, 2003)

Emma Hamilton

Flora Fraser, Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986)

Kate Williams, England’s Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (Hutchinson, 2006)

Dr. John Dee

John Dee, The Diaries of John Dee , ed. Edward Fenton (Day Books, 1998)

Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge, 2006)

Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Doctor Dee (HarperCollins, 2001)

Jack Parsons

John Carter, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons (Feral House, 2005)

George Pendle, Strange Angel (Harcourt, 2005)

Nikola Tesla

Robert Lomas, The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century (Headline, 2000)

Marc J. Seifer, Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla (Citadel Press, 1998)

Karl Marx

Karl Marx, Selected Writings , ed. David McLellan (Oxford, 2000)

Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (Fourth Estate, 1999)

St. Cuthbert

The Venerable Bede, The Age of Bede , ed. D. H. Farmer (Penguin, 2004)

Ann Lee

Richard Francis, Ann the Word: The Story of Ann Lee (Arcade, 2000)

William Blake

Peter Ackroyd, Blake (Sinclair Stevenson, 1995)

William Blake, The Poetry & Prose of William Blake , ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1927)

Marsha Keith Schuchard, Why Mrs. Blake Cried (Century, 2006)

Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism & Other Essays , ed. Alan Ryan (Penguin, 2004)

Leslie Stephen, The Utilitarians (London, 1900)

Richard Buckminster Fuller

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R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Lars Müller Publishers, 2008)

Anyone who would like to offer corrections or get specific sources is welcome to visit the special forum on the QI website: www.qi.com/talk/bookofthedead.

No book of this kind could be written without a crack team of researchers. For this project, three of them went well beyond the usual call of duty. Tim Ecott and James Harkin, as well as providing meticulous research notes on a host of lives, also wrote early drafts of some of the chapters, while Andy Murray, like a demented literary bodysnatcher, produced a constant stream of the freshly researched dead for our consideration.

Piers Fletcher, Molly Oldfield, Justin Pollard, Mat Coward, Dan Schreiber, Arron Ferster, and Will Bowen also added the odd corpse to the pile, as did Xander Cansell and Tibor Fischer. Special thanks must go to Catriona Luke, who raided the obituary cupboards at several large newspapers.

Thomas Edison once wrote that, “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.” The team at Crown are the most elegant hustlers in the business. Particular thanks must go to John Glusman, Shaye Areheart, Dyana Messina, and Domenica Alioto. It’s an honor to be part of their list.

Special thanks are due to our wives, Sarah Lloyd and Rachael Kerr, but this book is dedicated to our children, Harry, Claudia, Caitlin, Stella, George, Hamish, and Rory, for reminding us daily that life really is the thing.

THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE

THE BOOK OF ANIMAL IGNORANCE

IF IGNORANCE IS BLISS, WHY AREN’T THERE MORE HAPPY PEOPLE?

THE MEANING OF LIFF

THE DEEPER MEANING OF LIFF

Copyright © 2009 QI Ltd.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,

an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of

Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in Great Britain as The QI Book of the Dead by Faber and Faber Ltd, London, in 2009.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mitchinson, John, 1963–

The book of the dead / John Mitchinson & John Lloyd.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: London : Faber and Faber, 2009.

1. Biography—Anecdotes. 2. Anecdotes. I. Lloyd, John, 1951– II. Title.

CT109.M58 2010

920—dc22 2010004609

eISBN: 978-0-307-71641-5

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