The Book of the Dead

10 Is That All There Is?

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

J. Baldwin, Bucky Works: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today (J. Wiley & Sons, 1996)

R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Lars Muller 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.

Also by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson

THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE

THE BOOK OF ANIMAL IGNORANCE

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

Also by John Lloyd (with Douglas Adams)

THE MEANING OF LIFF

THE DEEPER MEANING OF LIFF

Copyright

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

_v3.1

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Notes

1

Impeachment is the process of putting a public official on trial for improper conduct (in this case corruption and misappropriation of public funds) with the intent of removing him or her from office. The House of Lords acquitted Dundas (and offered him an Earldom by way of apology), but he never held office again.

2

Lime-burners heated chalk in a kiln to 1,100°C, to make quicklime, the main ingredient of mortar (the forerunner of cement) used in building.

It was an important but badly paid and dangerous job. The dust could cause blindness or spontaneously combust, producing hideous burns. On top of that, carbon monoxide released by the process made the lime-burners dizzy. It was an easy matter to fall into the kiln and be incinerated.