Book description
'The English aristocrat John 'Mad Jack' Mytton died a bloated,
paralysed and penniless debtor in prison. His premature demise was
partly due to injuries sustained while setting fire to his own
night-shirt to try to cure hiccups. Just before the horribly burned
Mytton slumped into unconsciousness he said, "Well, the hiccups
is gone, by God."'
An 18th-century French scholar attributed the British talent for
eccentricity to a ‘mixture of fogs, beef and beer...aggravated by the
tedium of the English Sunday’. Whatever the reason, the British Isles do
seem to have thrown up more than their fair share of magnificent
oddballs, the finest of which are profiled in this fast, funny
celebration of over 200 aristocrats, inventors, artists and the just
plain weird...
* Dr Samuel Johnson is said to have shaved off all of his bodily hair,
just to see how long it would take to grow back
* Spencer Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire, once related an experience
he had at Westminster: 'I had a horrid nightmare. I dreamed I was making
a speech in the House of Lords, and woke up to find I actually was.'
* Percy Bysshe Shelley once tied a cat to a kite in a thunder storm to
see if it would be electrocuted Kark Shaw trained as a journalist (for NME
and others) and is the author of several humour books, including Gross
, Royal Babylon: An Irreverent History of European Royalty
, and the American bestseller Five People Who Died During Sex and 100
Other Terribly Tasteless Lists
. He currently works in marketing for the largest manufacturer of stool
jars in the country, and lives in Staffordshire with his family.
