Wit and wisdom in delightful feast of relevant and irreverent facts

CURIOUS, indeed, is this delighted mix of the relevant, irrelevant and simply irreverent facts, and facts they are, for Jenner is a fact-checker. He covers, through a combination of oddities and enquiry, the 24-hour day from real time to bath time and back to dawn.

There’s wit with his wisdom in spades, and not only the spades that covered the cesspool in a chapter that heaps piles of poo in domestic middens which existed alongside toilet seats and water flushing into sewers in Bronze Age Pakistan. And there’s the purpose of this book – to tell us that our ancestors, Ug and Nug, didn’t only smash people over the head with clubs. They would have been capable of using smartphones and driving fast cars.

This book was thus partly written to “rehabilitate their reputation” in a clever and informatively comic way.

Did you know, for instance, that the brilliant Benjamin Franklin cultivated a cantankerous side, writing in the press under the name of an old woman called Silence Dogwood?

Why is dawn not the start of the new day as it was in ancient Egypt, apart from the idea of drunken revellers singing Auld Lang Syne at breakfast time? Or that daylight saving only got accepted in Britain when Germany introduced it to save fuel in World War I; or that, given that America introduced five time zones, one 56.2km stretch covered seven zones and bus passengers had to change their watches every eight minutes?

Then it’s time to answer the call of nature... in the bog, toilet, bath- room privy or loo (the English place le lieu Anglais, lieu á l’anglais or Waterloo cisterns?).

Those who cleaned the cesspit were paid well, but not much respected – rather, he says, like the hedge fund managers of today. Conversely, Henry VIII’s groom of the stool, the official bum wiper and inspector, had a prestigious job.

Then there was the French court; Louis XIV held court perched on his loo, and Versailles stank.

And no, Crapper didn’t invent the flushing loo.

From this to food and more oddities, the can opener wasn’t invented for nearly 50 years after the tin can, so one wonders how the soldiers at Waterloo actually opened their canned meat.

There are lots of reasons why we don’t eat the potato, but not for a Swiss botanist’s reasons: the spud causes flatulence, lust and leprosy.

The famous corn flakes were produced because Kellogg was trying to find a diet to reduce libido and stop his patients from masturbating; this self-abuse causing 39 medical conditions, including cancer.

There’s even a recipe for sake, but you may be foolish to try it.

Read in a go or devour it in bits, it’s a feast however you approach it.

Most topics are a bite-sized page or so long, and pick up on points like this: philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who was turned into a human scarecrow in 1832 after his death so he could watch over the University College London he founded, was himself found decades later to have worn woollen boxers – a rarity for the time.

And this was a time that boasted one of the three fattest British monarchs of all time: George IV, who with Henry VIII and Victoria had a 137cm waist!

See what I mean?

The famous corn flakes were produced because Kellogg was trying to find a diet to reduce libido