The Mammoth Book of Useless Information. Noel Botham

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      • Twenty-five per cent of women think money makes a man sexier.

      • Pablo Picasso was born dead. His midwife abandoned him on a table, leaving Picasso’s uncle to bring him to life with a lungful of cigar smoke.

      • Tchaikovsky was financed by a wealthy widow for thirteen years. At her request, they never met.

      • The great lover and adventurer Casanova was earning his living as a librarian for a count in Bohemia when he died at the age of 73.

      • Today, 6.7 billion people live on the Earth.

      • The first person other than royalty to be portrayed on a British stamp was William Shakespeare, in 1964.

      • Offered a new pen to write with, 97 per cent of all people will write their own name.

      • There are 106 boys born for every 100 girls.

      • When Errol Flynn appeared as a contestant on the mid-1950s TV quiz show The Big Surprise, he was questioned about sailing and won $30,000.

      • The world’s population grows by 100 million each year.

      • In all, 950 million people in the world are malnourished.

      • Actor Montgomery Clift is said to haunt room number 928 of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, which was home to him for three months while filming From Here to Eternity (1953). Hotel guests and employees have reported sensing the actor’s presence, or have heard him reciting his lines and playing the trumpet. One guest felt a hand patting her shoulder, while others claim to feel cold spots in the room.

      • After Frank Lahainer died in March 1995, in Palm Beach, Florida, his widow Gianna had him embalmed and stored for forty days at a funeral home. It seemed that Frank, worth $300 million, died at an inconvenient time: it was the middle of Palm Beach’s social season and Gianna didn’t want to miss any of the parties.

      • Nuns in the United States have an average life expectancy of seventy-seven years, the longest of any group in the country.

      • The men who served as guards along the Great Wall of China in the Middle Ages were often born on the wall, grew up there, married there, died there and were buried within it. Many of these guards never left the wall in their entire lives.

      • St George, the patron saint of England, never actually visited England.

      • To help create her signature sexy walk, actress Marilyn Monroe sawed off part of the heel of one shoe.

      • After his death, the body of Pope Formosus was dug up and tried for various crimes.

      • As the official taste-tester for Edy’s Grand Ice Cream, John Harrison had his taste buds insured for $1 million.

      • Prompted by their immense public appeal, Ancient Roman gladiators performed product endorsements.

      • Cleopatra was part Macedonian, part Greek and part Iranian. She was not an Egyptian.

      • There are currently six reigning queens in Europe. They are: Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom; Queen Sofia of Spain; Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands; Queen Margrethe II of Denmark; Queen Silvia of Sweden; and Queen Fabiola of Belgium.

      • A man hit by a car in New York in 1977 got up uninjured, but lay back down in front of the car when a bystander told him to pretend he was hurt so he could collect insurance money. The car rolled forward and crushed him to death.

      • Julius Caesar, Martin Luther King and Jonathan Swift all suffered from Ménière’s disease. It is a disorder of the hearing and balance senses, causing progressive deafness and attacks of tinnitus and vertigo.

      • King Mithridates VI was so afraid of assassination by poisoning that he gave himself small doses of poison each day in the hope that he would naturally build up a resistance to poisons. When the Romans invaded in 63 BC, to avoid being captured he tried to commit suicide, but he had built up such an immunity that the poison he took had no effect on him. Eventually the king ordered a slave to kill him with his sword.

      • Johann Sebastian Bach once walked 230 miles (370km) to hear the organist at Lübeck in Germany.

      • Adolf Hitler was fascinated by hands. In his library there was a well-thumbed book containing pictures and drawings of hands belonging to famous people throughout history. He particularly liked to show his guests how closely his own hands resembled those of Frederick the Great, one of his heroes.

      • Handel wrote the score of his Messiah in just over three weeks.

      • US actor Larry Hagman didn’t allow smoking on the set of TV series Dallas.

      • St John was the only one of the twelve apostles to die a natural death.

      • The pioneering scientist Marie Curie was not allowed to become a member of the prestigious French Academy because she was a woman.

      • In 1994, Los Angeles police arrested a man for dressing as the Grim Reaper – complete with scythe – and standing outside the windows of old people’s homes, staring in.

      • The composer Richard Wagner was vegetarian, and once published a diatribe against ‘the abominable practice of flesh eating’.

      • Nazi Adolf Eichmann was originally a travelling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company of Austria.

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