The Pedant's Return - Tapa dura

Hot on the heels of the 2005 hit "The Pedant's Revolt" comes "The Pedant's Return", the latest in Andrea Barham's popular pedantry series. How many times have you encountered an extraordinary 'fact' in your everyday life that's led you to think, 'That can't possibly be true!'? Or you've heard something highly improbable and completely dismissed the chances of it being in the least bit authentic? In "The Pedant's Return", a great many doubts will be dispelled as a range of surprising statements that sound as though they couldn't possibly be genuine, are, through careful and committed research, revealed to be 100 per cent correct. Covering every conceivable subject matter, from art and literature to food and drink, the animal kingdom, figures from history, science and medical matters, words and sayings, the human body and buildings, "The Pedant's Return" will clear up those niggling points of fact endlessly disputed at social gatherings and among friends, in an accessible, informative and highly entertaining manner.

An author and freelance technical writer, Andrea Barham is the acceptable face of pedantry: while she is a big fan of the world, she feels there should be less wrongness and more rightness in it. Painfully aware of her inability to correct the bigger issues such as war, poverty and global warming, she is concentrating on smaller issues more suited to her skills, which consists of 'looking stuff up'. Having focused her mind on correcting a mass of misconceptions in the bestselling "The Pedant's Revolt" (2005), she has now made it her mission to highlight the truth behind a host of the most preposterous-sounding facts. "The Pedant's Return" is Andrea's sixth book.