Take a trip with a renowned literary scholar and critic into the more bizarre areas of literature, miscellany, facts, and trivia. Which author had the heaviest brain? What was the original title of "1984"? What do 12 percent of all winners of the Booker prize have in common? When did cigarettes start making an appearance in English literature? And, while we're at it, who wrote the first Western, and is there any link between asthma and literary genius? John Sutherland's irreverent literary masterpiece illuminates every topic imaginable from author advances to civil war literature to Victorian sex to odd things eaten by literary characters (think Patrick Bateman's girlfriend in "American Psycho"). This is the ideal anthology of useless information for all book lovers.