HERE ARE MANY, MANY THINGS THAT NOBODY KNOWS . . . Why are so many giraffes gay? Has human evolution stopped? Where did our alphabet come from? Can robots become self-aware? Can lobsters recognize other lobsters by sight? What goes on inside a black hole? Are cell phones bad for us? Why can't we remember anything from our earliest years? Full of the mysteries of life, the universe and everything, The Things that Nobody Knows is a fascinating and unputdownable exploration of the limits of human knowledge of our planet, its history and culture, and the universe beyond.

How old is the sloth? How do sloths have sex? How did a sloth save Dublin? The answers to these questions, and more, are found in this wonderfully entertaining celebration of the sloth. Walking readers through the sloth's evolutionary history - from the prehistoric ground sloth to modern pygmy - William Hartston reveals the sloth's fascinating journey from maligned mammal to cause celebre. Playfully peppered with science and filled with factoids, Sloths is a love-letter to the most anachronistic, and just a little bit ridiculous, of animals. 'Riveting... Sloths is as comprehensive a look at the instincts, lifestyle and capacities of this curious creature as you are ever likely to need.' Daily Express

A delightful and witty treasure trove of utterly useless information by the author of The Things That Nobody Knows. Most encyclopaedias are boring. They are so packed with worthy but dull facts that a great deal of weird and wonderful material is squeezed out. The Encyclopaedia of Everything Else takes the opposite approach and leaves out all the dreary stuff you can find elsewhere. The result is the most fascinating, astonishing, varied and utterly useless collection of information ever assembled and organized between two covers. From aardvark tooth bracelets to the genus of tropical weevils known as Zyzzyva, via Mark Twain's views about cabbages, this is a quarter of a million words of sublime pointlessness.

Of all human qualities, humour is perhaps the most puzzling. Why do audiences laugh at catchphrases but don’t laugh at jokes they have heard before? Why are words with a K in them generally found to be funnier? In this probing exploration, William Hartston interrogates every aspect of the evolution of humour and our attitudes toward it in hot pursuit of a Grand Unified Theory of Humour. From comedy in ancient Greece and jokes in ancient Rome, to laughter in the Bible and the secret of comic delivery, from how humour changed following the American Civil War, to the way Mark Twain influenced written comedy in the English-speaking world, William leaves no stone unturned in his quest to understand what makes us chuckle.

There are many, many things that nobody knows... Do animals have a sense of humour? Why do we have five fingers? What did Jesus do in his youth? Has human evolution stopped? Can robots become self-aware? What goes on inside a black hole? Bringing together The Things That Nobody Knows and Even More Things That Nobody Knows, this bumper volume takes us on a guided tour of 1,001 gaps in our knowledge of cosmology, mathematics, animal behaviour, medical science, music, art and literature.