QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  The 1994 bill was also the first British legislation ever to mention lesbian sex, setting the age of consent between two women at sixteen.

  Who lives in Europe’s smallest houses?

  We do.

  According to a survey by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), the British build the pokiest homes in Europe. The UK has both the smallest new houses and smallest average room size.

  The average size of a room in a new house in France is 26.9 square metres. The equivalent in the UK is 15.8 square metres – only a smidgeon larger than a standard parking space (14 square metres).

  In terms of overall floor space, the UK average for new homes is a miserly 76 square metres, less than a third of the size of the average tennis court. This compares to: Ireland (88 square metres); Spain (97 square metres); France (113 square metres) and Denmark (137 square metres).

  Outside Europe, the comparisons are even less flattering. Australian homes cover an average area of 206 square metres and American homes are nearly three times as big as ours at 214 square metres.

  There have been attempts to alter things for the better. In 1961 Sir Parker Morris (1891–1972), an urban planner and founder of the Housing Association’s Charitable Trust,chaired a government report called Homes for Today and Tomorrow. Out of this came a set of specifications, called the ‘Parker Morris’ standards. These went though each room in a standard house, laying down what the minimum floor space per inhabitant should be, the number of flushing toilets required, the acceptable standard of heating to be installed and a sensible amount of space for each essential piece of furniture. By 1967 the specifications had been adopted by all new towns, all local authority housing departments and most private developers.

  The Parker Morris standards were abolished in 1980. Under Mrs Thatcher’s iron rule, local authorities were urged to give priority to market forces instead. There are still no national minimum space standards for the UK, though in 2008 Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, pledged to reintroduce them for the capital in an updated, 10 per cent more generous form.

  Today almost three-quarters of UK residents say there’s not enough space in their kitchen for three small recycling bins,while half complain they don’t have enough space to use their furniture comfortably. More than a third claim their kitchens are too small even for a toaster or microwave and almost half say they don’t have enough space to entertain visitors.

  The expression ‘not enough room to swing a cat’ does not, as some people think, refer to the space needed to brandish a ‘cat o’nine tails’ whip. The first recorded use of the phrase (1665) is three decades earlier than the first use of the term ‘cat o’nine tails’ (1695).

  In Britain, when we say ‘not enough room to swing a cat’, we mean it literally.

  Which country is the most successful military power in European history?

  France.

  If you enter ‘French military victories’ on Google, a cheeky bit of software pops up with the message: ‘Did you mean French military defeats?’ This, plus the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ tag immortalised by The Simpsons, plays on the enduring reputation of the French army as cowardly losers. Mais,ce n’est pas vrai! France has the best military record in Europe.

  The French have fought more military campaigns than any other European nation and won twice as many battles as they have lost.

  According to historian Niall Ferguson, of the 125 major European wars fought since 1495, the French have participated in fifty – more than both Austria (forty-seven) and England (forty-three). And they’ve achieved an impressive batting average: out of 168 battles fought since 387 BC, they have won 109, lost forty-nine and drawn ten.

  The British tend to be rather selective about the battles they remember. Our triumphs at Waterloo and Trafalgar and in two World Wars easily make up for losing at Hastings. But the school curriculum never mentions the battle of Tours in 732, when Charles the Hammer, king of the Franks, defeated the Moors and saved the whole of Christendom from the grip of Islam. While every English schoolboy was once able to recite the roll-call of our glorious wins at Crécy (1346),Poiters (1356) and Agincourt (1415), no one’s ever heard of the French victories at Patay (1429) and (especially) at Castillon in 1453, where French cannons tore the English apart, winning the Hundred Years War and confirming France as the most powerful military nation in Europe.

  And what about Duke of Enghien thrashing the Spanish at Rocroi late on in the Thirty Years War in 1603, ending a century of Spanish dominance? Or the siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781 in which General Comte de Rochambeau defeated the British and paved the way for American independence? Under Napoleon, France crushed the might of Austria and Russia simultaneously at Austerlitz in 1805, and, at Verdun in 1916, the French pushed the Germans back decisively in one of the bloodiest battles of all time.

  The British always prided themselves on superiority at sea, but this was only because they realised they could never win a land war on the Continent. The French army has, for most of history, been the largest, best equipped and most strategically innovative in Europe. At its best, led by Napoleon in 1812, it achieved a feat that even the Nazis couldn’t repeat: it entered Moscow.

  These remarkable achievements help explain another French military victory. Whether it is ranks (general, captain,corporal, lieutenant); equipment (lance, mine, bayonet,epaulette, trench); organisation (volunteer, regiment, soldier, barracks) or strategy (army, camouflage, combat, esprit de corps, reconnaissance), the language of warfare is written in one language: French.

  STEPHEN Obviously Napoleon got a lot of victories on the way, but then we got the cane out of the cupboard and we gave him a damn good thrashing.

  In which country was Alexander the Great born?

  It depends who you’re asking. The simple answer is Greece. After that it gets complicated.

  Before the fourth century BC, Macedonia (or Macedon, meaning ‘land of the tall’) was a small kingdom in the northeast corner of the Greek peninsula. When Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) succeeded his father Philip II in 336 BC, Macedonia had already conquered all the other city-states and kingdoms of ancient Greece. The town of Alexander’s birth,Pella, then in the kingdom of Macedonia, is now in the area of Greece still known as Macedonia. But, by the time of his death, aged thirty-three, Alexander ruled more of the world than anyone before him, and the Macedonian empire had spread beyond Europe, into the Middle East and Asia. This is where the problems start.

  After Alexander’s empire disintegrated, Greece and the southern Balkans were ruled by the Romans, invaded by Slavs and conquered by the Ottoman Turks. Ethnic identities became entangled and rarely coincided with national boundaries. Nowhere was this more complicated than in Macedonia. Pella, Alexander’s home town, became Turkish,then Bulgarian, and then, in 1926, it was returned to Greece. Today, an estimated 4.5 million people claim to be Macedonian. They are spread across Greece, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Bulgaria, Serbia and Kosovo.

  Nineteenth-century diplomats called this ‘The Macedonian Question’ and you might think the answer to it would be the establishment of a Macedonian state. In fact, you might think that that’s what FYROM was. If only it were that simple. ‘Ethnic’ Macedonians are split into three main groups: Greek Macedonians (about 2.5 million, most of whom live in Macedonia in Greece); Macedonian Slavs (1.3 million, who live in FYROM); and Macedonian Bulgarians (about 370,000, who are also Slavs, but speak a different language from ‘Macedonian Slavs’, and live in the Bulgarian province of Pirin Macedonia). All three groups are Orthodox Christians,but there is no love lost between them.

  The Greeks refuse to accept the name FYROM, suggested as a compromise by the United Nations. They claim the only ‘true’ Macedonia is in Greece and that Macedonian culture, the legacy of Alexander the Great, is Greek and the Slavs can’t ‘steal’ it. The Macedonian Slavs say they can call their own country what they damn well please. The Bulgarians are more pragmati
c. They recognise FYROM but claim that most of ‘their’ Macedonians are proud Bulgarians first. In the meantime, they busily grant citizenship to thousands of immigrants from FYROM who want to live in Bulgaria since it joined the European Union in 2007.

  It’s an ironic legacy for Alexander, revered in his time as a great unifier. But his legend nonetheless endures. If you happen to be sailing in the Aegean when a mermaid stirs up the sea, don’t worry. Do as Greek fishermen still do. When she calls out, ‘Where is Alexander?’ just shout back, ‘He lives and reigns and keeps the world at peace,’ and you’ll get home safely.

  STEPHEN What did Alexander the Great do with the banana and the ring-necked parakeet?

  JEREMY HARDY Partied all night long.

  JO BRAND Was he like those people that go into casualty and say: ‘I was just hoovering, and I slipped, and it went up my arse’?

  JEREMY ‘I put the parrot in to get it out.’

  STEPHEN Well, no, the answer is actually that, er, Alexander the Great introduced them to Europe.

  Who killed Joan of Arc?

  It was the French, not the English, who executed the ‘Maid of Orléans’. They burnt her for being a cross-dresser.

  Jeanne d’Arc (1412–31) was a peasant girl from Domrémy in north-east France who inspired a remarkable series of victories during the Hundred Years War – England’s long and doomed attempt to conquer France.

  By 1420 the King of France, Charles VI (known as ‘Charles the Mad’ because he suffered from the delusion that he was made of glass) was too ill to rule. His queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, took charge. She agreed to the marriage of her daughter Catherine to the English king, Henry V, transferring the French succession to their offspring and declaring her own son Charles illegitimate.

  The French king Charles VI and the English king Henry V died within weeks of each other in 1422, and the infant son of Henry V and Catherine, Henry VI, was declared king of both England and France. The disinherited Charles of France still had the support of a group of French nobles, but his coffers were empty and he had fallen out with the powerful Duke of Burgundy, who threw in his lot with the English. By 1428, the Anglo-Burgundian alliance controlled all of northern France,including Paris, and had ventured as far south as the Loire, where they began laying siege to the city of Orléans.

  Then fate intervened. An eighteen-year-old illiterate farm girl presented herself to the future Charles VII. She said God had spoken to her and that she would drive out the English and install Charles as king. Whether it was divine will that was on her side (an old French prophecy said that a young maid would save France) or her tactical nous (she favoured pre-emptive attacks) her impact was immediate. Dressed as a man, with cropped hair and wearing white armour, she broke the five-month English siege at Orléans in a week. More triumphs followed. Charles VII was crowned at Reims seven weeks later.

  In early 1430 Jeanne fell into the hands of Burgundian troops. They sold her to the English for a ransom (worth £4.5 million today) and the English persuaded a French ecclesiastical court to bring charges of heresy against her.

  When she came to trial eight months later, she had suffered torture and probably rape at the hands of her captors. She confessed, but then recanted, claiming she’d only done so ‘out of fear of the fire’ and reappeared dressed in men’s clothes. Given that the most serious charge against her was dressing as a man – an ‘abomination unto the Lord’ (Deuteronomy 22:5) – this was all the French judge, Pierre Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, needed.

  On 30 May 1431 Joan was burnt at the stake at Rouen. She was nineteen. To prevent people from building a shrine in her honour, her remains were dumped in the Seine. In 1453 Charles VII avenged her memory by expelling the English from France and ending the Hundred Years War. Soon afterwards Pope Callixtus III ordered a retrial in which Joan of Arc was found ‘not guilty’. Sadly, it was too late to find her ‘not dead’ as well.

  How tall was Napoleon?

  He wasn’t short.

  The universal belief that Napoleon Bonaparte (1769– 1821) was tiny came about from a combination of mistranslation and propaganda.

  Napoleon’s autopsy, carried out in 1821 by his personal physician Francesco Antommarchi, recorded his height as ‘5/2’. It is now thought this represents the French measurement ‘5 pieds 2 pouces’, which converts to English measurement as 5 feet 6½ inches (1.69 metres).

  The average height of Frenchmen between 1800 and 1820 was 5 feet 4½ inches (1.64 metres), so Napoleon would have been taller than most of the people he knew and taller, in fact, than the average Englishman, who was then 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 metres). Napoleon was only 2½ inches shorter than the Duke of Wellington – tall for his day at 5 feet 9 inches (1.75 metres) – and 2½ inches taller than his other great rival Horatio Nelson, who was only 5 feet 4 inches (1.62 metres).

  Shortly after seizing power in 1799, Napoleon imposed height requirements on all French troops. In the elite Imperial Guard, Grenadiers had to be at least 5 feet 10 inches tall (1.78 metres) and his personal guard, the elite Mounted Chasseurs, had to be a minimum of 5 feet 7 inches (1.7 m). So, for much of the time, the soldiers around him would have been noticeably taller, creating the impression that he was small.

  The great British caricaturist James Gillray (1757–1815) produced the first and most damaging image of a diminutive Napoleon in ‘The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver’, inspired by Gulliver’s Travels. In the cartoon George III holds Napoleon in the palm of his hand, inspects him with an eye-glass and comments, ‘I cannot but conclude you to be one of the most pernicious little odious reptiles that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth.’

  The survival of the ‘short Napoleon’ myth is perpetuated by the widespread use of the term ‘Napoleon complex’ to describe short people who supposedly make up for their lack of stature by being aggressive.

  There isn’t much scientific evidence for this commonly held theory, however. It’s not an officially recognised psychiatric syndrome and it doesn’t seem to occur in the animal kingdom. Although one study found that, in contests between males in some species of swordtail fish, the smaller fish started 78 per cent of the fights, this is very much the exception.

  Napoleon may have been aggressive, but he wasn’t small.

  STEPHEN Nelson was three inches shorter than Napoleon.

  ALAN Nelson was five foot four?

  STEPHEN Yeah.

  ALAN Like Danny de Vito?

  STEPHEN Yes. He was a very short chap.

  ALAN No wonder they put him on such a big column.

  What did Mussolini do?

  He certainly didn’t make the trains run on time. If anything, he made them less reliable than before.

  As early as 1925 European and American fascist sympathisers said of Mussolini, ‘At least he makes the trains run on time.’ It defused criticism of his despotic policies. Even if all the stories about him were true, only a strong leader could bring order to the chaos in Italy after the First World War.

  Today, the cliché is used to belittle a useless person or as a sarcastic complaint about the shortcomings of one’s own country: ‘Even Mussolini managed to get the trains running on time!’

  When Mussolini arrived on the political scene in the early 1920s, the Italian railways were already working as well as any in Europe. The credit for this largely belongs to Cavaliere Carlo Crova, general manager of Italian State Railways in the 1920s, who built an effective, nationalised rail system from the ruins of several private companies. His life’s work merely happened to coincide with Mussolini’s ascent to power.

  Contemporary reports by foreign journalists and diplomats say that, under the Fascist government of the 1930s, the trains didn’t operate particularly well, especially on local lines. Fuel and staff were diverted from the railways to mount the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Once the Second World War started, coal had to be imported by land instead of sea, and the railways weren’t up to the job.

  Italian government
propaganda – and its banning of any reporting of rail delays – meant that none of the problems were addressed. Italy’s railways were officially excellent and no one dared suggest otherwise.

  Interestingly, even in his most detailed and boastful biographical writings, Il Duce himself never claimed to have made the trains run on time. But he may have been the origin of the myth. According to his authorised biography, when the king summoned him to form a government in 1922, Mussolini told his local station master: ‘We must leave exactly on time – from now on everything must function to perfection!’

  A number of railway stations were built or renovated under Mussolini, notably Ostiense in Rome, specially designed so that Hitler could arrive at somewhere suitably ‘ancient Roman’ when he visited the city.

  Among Mussolini’s many unfulfilled ambitions was straightening the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which he felt gave the wrong image of the new Italy. On his orders in 1934 tons of liquid concrete were poured into the wonky landmark’s foundations. The result was that the concrete sank into the wet clay, and the tower began leaning even more.

  Who thought Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton?

  Apparently, it was Adolf Hitler.

  The Duke of Wellington would have been horrified by the suggestion that he thought cricket had anything to do with his famous victory. Wellington hated sport. Furthermore, he was unhappy at Eton and during his time there the school didn’t have any playing fields.

  According to the historian Sir Edward Creasy, the misunderstanding came about in the following way. Decades after the battle of Waterloo, the Duke passed an Eton cricket match and remarked: ‘There grows the stuff that won Waterloo.’ But this was purely a general comment about the qualities of the British officer class, not an appreciation of his old school’s cricket coaching.