The most interesting things about literary classics we learnt from the new QI book
Here at Interesting Literature we’re fans of the BBC TV show QI, hosted by Stephen Fry and created by John Lloyd, the producer of such British comedy classics as Blackadder and Spitting Image. We’re lucky enough to count the makers of the programme among our Twitter friends, and they’ve even cited us as the source for some of the facts in one of their previous books (namely the fascinating fact-filled 1,411 QI Facts To Knock You Sideways
). We also love the QI spirit: for those of you who don’t know the show, the idea is to look more closely at widely held beliefs (and ‘facts’) in order to discover how true they really are. A cornerstone of the QI ‘philosophy’ is the notion of debunking misconceptions, something that can be traced back at least as far as Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century natural philosopher, who is the subject of one of our earlier posts (and who, quite neatly, was the first person to use the word ‘misconception’). Like Snopes.com (named, by the way, after a family from William Faulkner‘s novels), the QI spirit entails examining and then, where necessary, correcting the ‘truths’ we hold so dear.
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