David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

When David and his troops returned to the city of Ziklag, after being sent home by the princes of the Philistines, they discovered that the Amalekites had invaded the city and taken captive all of the women and children, including David’s two wives. David and his followers immediately ‘lifted up their voices and wept until they had no more power to weep’.

Paul Gascoigne arrived at the Italia 90 World Cup as an up-and-coming young footballer with a gift for the unexpected on the field and a reputation for being, in his manager’s words, ‘as daft as a brush’ off it. He left it a national folk hero. And all because millions of English football fans, glued to their TV sets back home, saw him weep. In the semi-final England were playing old rivals Germany — then still just West Germany. Gazza, whose performances in earlier rounds had helped his team to overcome a poor start to the competition, was again playing like a man inspired. Then tragedy struck. Gascoigne was booked for a reckless tackle. Even if England made it to the final, he would not play in the match. As the realisation hit home, Gazza’s face crumpled and the tears began to flow. England went on to lose the match on penalties but Gazza had been taken to the nation’s hearts and all the sorry antics of his later career have been unable quite to destroy that earlier image of him as a little boy lost on the world football stage.

Hooker, the revered American blues musician, told an interviewer in 1998, ‘You can’t get no deeper than me and my guitar. I open my mouth, and it’s there. I get so deep the teardrops come to my eyes. That’s why I wear my dark glasses, so you won’t see the teardrops.’

Michael Jordan cried openly when, while playing with the Chicago Bulls, he won his first NBA title in 1991 and this drew no comment from the press. hen, when he won his fourth title in 1996, he wept once more, falling onto the floor in a foetal position and sobbing when the game ended. This time TV announcers explained that Jordan’s father had been murdered a year and a half before; the game was played on Father’s Day, and Jordan had made an incredible comeback after retiring for two years.

During a 1977 television interview, Nixon told David Frost, ‘I never cry — except in public.’ Nixon’s most famous public weep occurred in 1952 after he made his notorious ‘Checkers speech’ and Dwight Eisenhower decided to allow him to remain on the Republican ticket as the vice-presidential candidate. Watching this performance, Nixon’s college drama coach, Albert Upton, who had taught the future politician how to cry, remarked, ‘Here goes my actor.’

Presley cried so frequently in public that his nicknames included ‘The Cry Guy’, ‘The Prince of Wails’, ‘The Golden Tearjerker’, ‘The Cheerful Tearful’, ‘Squirt-Gun Eyes’ and ‘America’s Number One Public Weeper’.

Ryzhkov was Prime Minister during Mikhail Gorbachev’s reign. He received his nickname, ‘The Weeping Bolshevik’, for crying in front of the press when visiting Armenia after the brutal earthquake of 1988. Opposition critics treated him as an object of ridicule, a pathetic clown. Running for Parliament in 1995, he countered accusations that tears proved him too weak to hold a position of power, implying others would have wept had they seen the same horrors. By changing public opinion to that of viewing tears not as a weakness but as a sign of humanity, Ryzhkov won the election.

Towards the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, General Schwarzkopf was interviewed on television by Barbara Walters. His eyes welled up with tears as he answered personal questions. Walters said, ‘Generals don’t cry’. Schwarzkopf replied, ‘Grant, after Shiloh, went back and cried. Sherman went back and cried… and these are tough old guys… Lincoln cried.’ He added that he held back his tears in front of his troops during the war for the purpose of morale; although he could cry in front of them during a Christmas Eve service, where he was embodying the role of father figure, rather than commanding officer.

In our society a married woman loses part of her identity through taking her husband’s family name. Should her children happen to become famous, her husband’s family is immortalised while her own family is consigned to oblivion. (Picasso is one of the few famous men who chose to use his mother’s name, partly because it was less common than Ruiz, his father’s name.) It seems fitting to turn the spotlight, for once, upon the maternal branch responsible for contributing half the genetic endowment of the world’s immortals and mortals.

• William Arden ( Shakespeare )

• Isaac Ayscough ( Newton )

• Johann Sebastian Lämmerhirt ( Bach )

• George Ball ( Washington )

• Thomas Randolph ( Jefferson )

• Johann Wolfgang Textor ( von Goethe )

• Wolfgang Amadeus Pertl ( Mozart )

• Napoleon Ramolino ( Bonaparte )

• Ludwig Keverich ( van Beethoven )

• Abraham Hanks ( Lincoln )

• Charles Wedgwood ( Darwin )

• Charles Barrow ( Dickens )

• Karl Pressburg ( Marx )

• Sigmund Nathanson ( Freud )

• George Bernard Gurly ( Shaw )

• Winston Jerome ( Churchill )

• Albert Koch ( Einstein )

• Charlie Hill ( Chaplin )

• Ernest Hall ( Hemingway )

• Frank Garaventi ( Sinatra )

• Mick Scutts ( Jagger )

• Sylvester Labofish ( Stallone )

• Stephen Pillsbury ( King )

• Arnold Jedrny ( Schwarzenegger )

• Michael Scruse ( Jackson )

• Osama Ghanem ( bin Laden )

• Tiger Punsawad ( Woods )

‘The woman from Texas with four legs’ was the only freak who could challenge the ‘King of Freaks’ Frank Lentini as a box-office attraction. (‘Freak’ expresses dramatic physical deviation from the norm and was not offensive to those in the sideshows.) The body of a twin grew from between Myrtle’s legs, well developed from the waist down and completely functional. Myrtle was married and, according to her billing, had five children — three from her own body and two from her twin’s.

Born in Cuba, Jean (or Juan) was a good-looking, well-proportioned boy who happened to have two fully-functioning penises and an extra pair of legs behind and between his own, united along their length. His mental and physical capacities were considered above normal and so, according to one report, was his ‘animal passion’ and sexual functioning. He was exhibited in Havana in 1865 and later in Paris, where he is alleged to have had an affair with the three-legged courtesan, Blanche Dumas, who had two vaginas.

Written up in the book called Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine in 1896, the Foldi family was described as living in the tribe of the Hyabites in ‘Arabia’ for many generations. Each member of the large family had 24 digits. They confined their marriages to other members of the tribe, so the trait was usually inherited. In fact, if a baby was born with only 10 fingers and 10 toes, it was sacrificed as the product of adultery.