Now we know: Joanna Lumley was born in 1537!

THe Secret Library is the first out-andout Christmas gift book I have seen this year, but fortunately it’s a cracker. Oliver Tearle is a lecturer in english at Loughborough University, but more crucially he is a fine and funny writer and a tireless researcher of bizarre, book-related facts.

He seeks to answer questions about books you hadn’t even thought to ask.

Has science fiction ever accurately predicted the future? Who was euclid and what did he do that was so groundbreaking? Who was the first playwright to write a play called Hamlet? It wasn’t Shakespeare, that’s for certain.

It was a man called Thomas Kyd, who wrote a play called Hamlet 12 years before the Bard of Avon penned his. It was focused on the theme of revenge, and even featured a ghost. Sadly — or maybe fortunately — it has not survived.

American money bears a Latin phrase, e pluribus unum, taken from a recipe for pesto, possibly written by Virgil.

No one knows anything about Homer: who he was, when he lived, whether or not he wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Victorian novelist Samuel Butler thought he might have been a woman.

The great, epic poem Beowulf was virtually unknown and forgotten about for nearly a thousand years. Until the 19th century it existed in a single manuscript which survived burning houses, the Civil War and general neglect before someone made another copy in 1815.

The Montagues and Capulets, the warring families in Romeo and Juliet, actually existed and featured in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which, as well as stuff