Handpicked to ‘make you sound clever, or sympathetic, or worldly wise’, this selection of short quotations, with commentaries, is arranged in broad topics, beginning with the meaning of life and ending with useless knowledge (‘There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge’ – Bertrand Russell), and draws on sources of wisdom from the Bible to Zsa Zsa Gabor.

In the seventh century a yard was as much a reckoning of the worth of some land as a set measure of its dimensions and, although the term came to mean a unit of distance, the 36-inch standard was not settled until 1855. This light-hearted compendium explores the origins of our weighing, measuring and timing systems from the Babylonian calendar to the metric system.

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