This book by John Oldale is “a global gazetteer of the instructive & strange”. It’s arranged by country. I read it in the bath and facts keep lodging themselves in my head. For example: Luxembourg, the richest country in the world, was taken over by communist revolutionaries for a few hours on 9 November 1918; there’s a swamp in South Sudan the size of England, visited every dry season by two million antelopes; the babies of the Aka pygmies of northern Congo are proportionately the biggest in the world; and US tank crews are highly superstitious about apricots and won’t let their machines close to one. I haven’t yet got to the chick with the hippo. Out now, here’s the link.
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