The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  Ian Kelly, Casanova: Actor, Spy, Lover, Priest (Hodder, 2008)

  Catherine the Great

  Simon Dixon, Catherine the Great (Profile Books, 2009)

  Virginia Rounding, Catherine the Great: Love, Sex and Power (Hutchinson, 2006)

  Cora Pearl

  Katie Hickman, Courtesans (HarperCollins, 2003)

  Cora Pearl, The Memoirs of Cora Pearl: The Erotic Reminiscences of a Flamboyant Nineteenth-century Courtesan, ed. William Blatchford (Granada, 1983)

  Virginia Rounding, Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four Nineteenth-Century Courtesans (Bloomsbury, 2003)

  H. G. Wells

  Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, H. G. Wells: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1973)

  H. G. Wells, H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography, new ed. (Faber, 2008)

  Colette

  Colette, Cheri, new ed. (Vintage, 2001)

  Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Bloomsbury, 1999)

  Marie Bonaparte

  Celia Bertin, Marie Bonaparte: A Life (Harcourt, 1982)

  Alfred Kinsey

  Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey (Chatto & Windus, 1998)

  Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, ed. Alfred C. Kinsey (W. B. Saunders, 1948)

  Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, ed. Alfred C. Kinsey (W. B. Saunders, 1953)

  Tallulah Bankhead

  Tallulah Bankhead, My Autobiography, new ed. (University Press of Mississippi, 2008)

  David Bret, Tallulah Bankhead: A Scandalous Life (Robson, 1996)

  5 Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone

  Helena, Comtesse de Noailles

  Catherine Caufield, The Emperor of the United States of America & Other Magnificent British Eccentrics (Routledge, 1981)

  George Fordyce

  Clarke, The Georgian Era: Memoirs of the Most Eminent Persons, who Have Flourished in Great Britain (London, 1832)

  John Cordy Jeaffreson, A Book about Doctors (London, 1860)

  Elizabeth, Empress of Austria

  Joan Haslip, The Lonely Empress: Elizabeth of Austria (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965)

  Dr. John Harvey Kellogg

  T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Road to Wellville: A Comedy of the Heart & Other Organs (Little, Brown, 1981)

  Henry Ford

  Henry Ford, My Life & Work (NuVision Publications, 2007)

  Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford & the American Century (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

  Howard Hughes

  Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske, Howard Hughes: The Untold Story (Little, Brown, 1996)

  Howard Hughes, The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters, ed. Richard Hack, (New Millenium Press, 2001)

  6 Grin and Bear It

  Pieter Stuyvesant

  Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (Doubleday, 2004)

  General Antonio López de Santa Anna

  Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2008)

  Daniel Lambert

  Jan Bondeson, The Pig-faced Lady of Manchester Square & Other Medical Marvels (Tempus, 2004)

  Florence Nightingale

  Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale: The Woman & her Legend (Viking, 2008)

  Florence Nightingale, Florence Nightingale’s Suggestions for Thought (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005)

  Hugh Small, Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel (Constable & Robinson, 1999)

  Fernando Pessoa

  Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, tr. Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2002)

  Fernando Pessoa, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, tr. Richard Zenith (Grove Atlantic, 2002)

  Dawn Langley Simmons

  Dawn Langley Simmons, Dawn: A Charleston Legend (Wyrick & Co., 1995)

  7 The Monkey Keepers

  Oliver Cromwell

  Antonia Fraser, Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997)

  H. E. Marshall, Through Great Britain & Ireland with Cromwell (London, 1912)

  Catherine de’ Medici

  Leonie Frieda, Catherine de’ Medici (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004)

  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)

  8 Who Do You Think You Are?

  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)

  9 Once You’re Dead, You’re Made for Life

  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)

 
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 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.

  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

  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.

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  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.

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  3

  Literally, “The Red (or Auburn) Moon,” from her round face and red hair, but it’s cleverer than that. In French La Lune Rousse also means “The April Moon,” one that coincides with the frosts that can destroy the shoots of young plants.

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  4

  It’s possible that she inherited the monkey from her father-in-law: A long-tailed monkey appears in a miniature portrait of Francis I and his courtiers.

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  5

  His contemporaries found it difficult to agree on how to spell his name—probably because his fame spread by word of mouth. Here are some of the many versions recorded: Rhembrant, Rheinbrand, Reijnbrand, Rhaerbrant, Rimbrantt, Rembrand, Remblant, Reijnbrant, Rembrando, Rheimbrand, Rijnbrandt, Rimbrandt, Rem Brant, Reijmbrant, Renbrant, Reynbrant, Rymbrandt, Rheinbrandt, Rhijnbrandt, Reimbrant, Rhinbrant, Rinebrant, Rynbrant, Rijnbrant, Reinbrand, Rimbram, Rhinbrand, Rhimbrant.

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