— The Nelson Evening Mail, January 6 1909

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The new Norwegian Bible translation is by no means a rush job.

Gieves & Hawkes is the cheapest Top 10 London tailor. Prices start around £800.

Sri Lanka’s Batatotalena cave temple, in which the Buddha is believed once to have rested, contains a mural incorporating the British royal coat of arms.

It is empirically improbable that everybody was kung fu fighting.

Les Miserables contains a sentence that is 823 words long.

Natalie Imbruglia’s late-’90s single ‘Torn’ was apparently a cover.

Writing the word ‘Adult’ on the cover of a children’s colouring book makes a cheap alternative to expensive adult colouring books.

China’s longest bridge is longer than America’s six longest bridges all together.

In the first test between England and the West Indies at Edgbaston in 2017, 19 West Indian wickets fell on day three.

Shostakovich was afraid of prostitutes and janitors.

The ruler of Egypt once gave Charles X of France a giraffe. It walked to Paris with an antelope.

Pukka Pies don’t compromise.

For the last twenty years of his life Rudolf Hess was the only inmate of the Spandau Prison.

— The Nelson Evening Mail, July 13 1908

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The inhabitants of Ipswich are the least passionate in the UK, having sex on average only 18 times per annum.

Gazelles are quite amenable to snuff.

Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich was a fully-trained football referee and tennis umpire. His (third) wife was a qualified lift operator.

The human heart is an abyss that is impossible to predict.

There is a special place in the afterlife for people who place the winning bids on eBay and then decide they don’t want the stuff after all.

The traditional vodka-drinking number is three people.

French mineralogist Déodat-Guy-Sylvain-Tancrède Gratet de Dolomieu wrote a pioneering work of geological theory in the margins of a Bible.

Great Portland Street is not, in fact, all that impressive.

The Assassination of Jesse James recouped only half of its production budget.

Some people see each other for the first time in Aberystwyth.

If you say ‘Yankees’ in class, it’s a swear.

James IV of Scotland once marooned two children on an island to see if they would learn to speak in tongues.

15% of people find literature too difficult to understand.

[In which we learn, also, that it is better to file one’s copy at the absolute last minute, thereby precluding the editor from tampering with the text.]