The Gin Lane Gazette

Many of us think of the ill-behaved celebrity and the tabloid splash as modern inventions, but the antics of footballers and soap stars are as nothing when set alongside the hell-raising of the 18th century celebs. The Gin Lane Gazette is stuffed with true stories of boozy MPs who settled their political differences with duels in Hyde Park; peers of the realm who sat the unburied corpses of their cherished mistresses at their dinner tables; entertainers who rode horses standing upright in the saddle, while wearing a mask of bees; and famous courtesans who ate 1,000-guinea banknotes stuffed into sandwiches, simply to make a point. Before it was dashed from their lips by the Victorian party-poopers, our Georgian forebears drank deep from the cup of life.

For many years we've known about Six Degrees of Separation: the idea that every person on the planet can be linked by a chain of just six individuals. Now, former Scotland Yard criminal intelligence officer Stevyn Colgan has designed a paper-based wireless device to do the same thing with facts – a kind of Six Degrees of Information. Called the Connectoscope, it will teach you, among many other things, what humans taste like to robots, why there were bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover, how a tree became the New York Stock Exchange, why Bob the Builder has more fingers In Japan than in the UK, who the patron saint of medical records is, and how to make Superman gay. Colgan sets out to prove that everything can be connected. As this dizzyingly fact-filled book shows, the fun lies in figuring out how.

The definitive work on the subject, this Dictionary - available again in its eighth edition - gives a full account of slang and unconventional English over four centuries and will entertain and inform all language-lovers.