Open this book at any page and you will learn new things. Jonn somehow manages to make the world seem at the same time more orderly and ungraspably huge and varied.>

Autorentext

Jonn Elledge is a New Statesman and New**World columnist, a regular on the podcasts Oh God, What**Now? and the late, lamented Paper**Cuts,and a frequent contributor to the Big Issue, the Guardian and assorted other publications. He was previously an assistant editor at the New Statesman, where he created and ran its urbanism-focused CityMetric site, spending six happy years writing about cities, maps and borders and hosting the Skylines podcast. He has written three books, as well as over 200 editions of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything. He lives in London, with the best dog in the world.

Klappentext

Brought to you from the inquisitive mind of Jonn Elledge, the number-one bestselling author of A History of the World in 47 Borders, *The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything *is a treasure trove of random knowledge. Covering everything from the furthest known galaxies to the murky origins of oyster ice cream, inside you will find a discussion of how one might determine the most average-sized country in the world; details of humanity's most ridiculous wars; and, at last, the answer to who would win in a fight between Harry Potter and Spider-Man.

Bizarre, brilliant and filled with the unexpected, *The Compendium *covers the breadth and depth of human experience, weaving its way through words and numbers, science and the arts, the spiritual and the secular. It's a feast of facts for a hungry mind.

Includes entries on the cosmos, the human planet (and the lines we draw on it), questions of measurement, history and politics, the natural world, leisure and many 'oddities' that don't fit elsewhere...