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For a decade Stephen Fry has challenged TV audiences with questions which are, well, quite interesting.

Since 2003 the cerebral host of the BBC’s popular comic quiz Qi – which, of course, stands for “Quite Interesting” – has been punishing show regular Alan Davies for giving obvious but wrong answers.

Instead marks are awarded for the obscure, the fascinating and remarkable nuggets of wisdom.

Now the best bits from 10 years of the show have been packed into a new book, 1,227 Qi Facts.

1 When customers visited the UK’s first supermarkets they were afraid to pick up goods in case they were told off.

2 Women buy 80% of everything that is for sale.

3 Nelson Mandela was not removed from the US terror watch list until 2008.

4 The founder of match.com, Gary Kremen, lost his girlfriend to a man she met on match.com.

5 The proud owner of the first silicone breast implant was a dog called Esmeralda.

6 In 1915, the lock millionaire Cecil Chubb bought his wife Stonehenge. She didn’t like it, so in 1918 he gave it to the nation.

7 Thomas Edison’s last breath is held in a vial at the Henry Ford museum in Detroit.

8 A pumping human heart can squirt blood 30ft.

9 In ancient Greek the word “idiot” meant anyone who wasn’t a politician.

10 Jimmy Carter once sent a jacket to the cleaner’s with the nuclear detonation codes still in the pocket.

11 The second man to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, Bobby Leach, survived the fall but later died as a result of slipping on a piece of orange peel.

12 Just like humans, British cows moo in regional accents.

13 Every year, 4 million cats are eaten in Asia.

14 Under Chairman Mao, every Chinese family was obliged to kill a sparrow a week to stop them eating all the rice. The project was ineffective because sparrows don’t eat rice.

15 John Cleese’s father’s surname was Cheese. Cleese grew up 10miles from Cheddar and his best friend at school was called Barney Butter.

16 The last private resident of 10 Downing Street was a Mr Chicken.

17 The shortest war ever fought was between Britain and Zanzibar on August 27, 1896. Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.

18 The sun’s core is so hot that a piece of it the size of a pinhead would give off enough heat to kill a person 160 kilometres away.

19 Liechtenstein, the world’s sixth smallest country, is the largest exporter of false teeth.

20 Michael J Fox’s middle name is Andrew.

21 In 1811, nearly a quarter of all the women in Britain were named Mary.

22 In 1881, there were only six men in Britain called Derek.

23 Only 4 Clives and 13 Trevors were born in the UK in 2011.

24 It’s unsafe for travellers to rely on St Christopher any more: he lost his sainthood in 1969.

25 Until 1913, children in America could legally be sent by parcel post.

26 China is the world’s largest supplier of Bibles: one factory in Nanjing prints a million a month.

27 Ants can survive in a microwave: they are small enough to dodge the rays.

28 Heroin was originally marketed as cough medicine.

29 The Nazis made it illegal on pain of death for apes to give the Heil Hitler salute.

30 When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, one of the suspects was Picasso.

(Image: Getty)

31 The Dyslexia Research Centre is in Reading.

32 The United States of America maintains a military presence in 148 of the 192 United Nations countries.

33 If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth and jumped in, it would take you exactly 42 minutes and 12 seconds to get to the other side.

34 Beyonce Knowles is an 8th cousin, four times removed, of Gustav Mahler.

35 All but one of the ravens at the Tower of London died from stress during the Blitz.

36 George W Bush and Saddam Hussein had their shoes hand-made by the same Italian cobbler.

37 In his first year at Harrow, Winston Churchill was bottom of the whole school.

38 The Irish poet Brendan Behan became an alcoholic at the age of eight.

39 In Afghanistan and Iraq it takes 250,000 bullets (three tons of ammunition) to kill each insurgent.

40 Baseball legend Babe Ruth always wore a cabbage leaf under his cap to keep his head cool. In South Korea, this is considered unsporting, unless the player has a doctor’s note.

41 Under extreme high pressure, diamonds can be made from peanut butter.

42 The citizens of Kuwait celebrated the end of the first Gulf War by firing weapons into the air. 20 Kuwaitis died as a result of bullets falling from the sky.

43 The Sami people of northern Finland use a measure called Poronkusema: the distance a reindeer can walk before needing to urinate.

(Image: PA)

44 In 2009, a retired policeman called Geraint Woolford was admitted to Abergale Hospital in north Wales and ended up next to another retired policeman called Geraint Woolford. The men weren’t related, had never met and were the only two people in the UK called Geraint Woolford.

45 In 1999, Darlington FC acquired 50,000 worms to irrigate their waterlogged pitch. They all drowned.

46 Edmund Hillary, right, the first man to climb Everest, was a professional beekeeper. When filling in forms, he always gave his occupation as “apiarist”.

47 Tintin is called Tantan in Japanese because TinTinis pronounced ‘Chin chin’ and means penis.

48 The water in the mouth of ablue whale weighs more thanits body.

49 Saddam’s bunker was designed by the grandson of the woman who built Hitler’s bunker.

50 The first-ever edition of the Daily Mirror, left, came with a free mirror.

1,227 Qi Facts To Blow Your Socks Off, compiled by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson and James Harkin, is published by Faber and Faber and priced £9.99. © QI 2012 (Faber and Faber).