Flabbergasting QI facts to impress your pals with

QI is one of the most entertaining and amusing shows on TV.

And fans lap up the accompanying books.

The latest – 1,342 QI Facts To Leave You Flabbergasted – is just out. Bill Gibb picks out a fun selection…

Alfred Hitchcock bought up all the copies of the novel Psycho so people wouldn’t find out the ending to his film adaptation.

Ten-trillionths of your suntan comes from stars in galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

Shuttlecocks used in professional badminton are made of feathers from the left wing of a goose. Feathers from the right wing make them spin the wrong way.

To avoid exciting men, early bicycles for women had a “cherry screen” to hide their ankles.

Neanderthals are shown as slouching because the first one to be reconstructed happened to have arthritis.

In the Halloween movies, Jason the killer wears a Captain Kirk mask, sprayed white.

The surface area of a cat, including each hair of its fur, is 100 times that of its skin and is enough to cover a ping-pong table.

Invented in 1862, the anti-garrotting cravat shot spikes into the hands of anyone attempting to strangle the wearer.

After noticing she washed up bare-handed, Margaret Thatcher sent the Queen rubber gloves for Christmas.

Britain’s share of the cost of funding the Large Hadron Collider each year is the same amount of money as Britons spend on peanuts.

The Queen’s advisers persuaded her not to allow the Loch Ness Monster to be named Elizabethia nessiae.

Sand wasps fly backwards out of the nest to make sure they’ll remember what the way home looks like.

Napoleon had such painful piles at the Battle of Waterloo that he couldn’t sit on his horse.

The average Briton has five first cousins, 28 second cousins, 175 third cousins, 1570 fourth cousins and 17,300 fifth cousins.

Before José ‘Pepe’ Mujica became president of Uruguay, he spent 14 years in prison, two of them locked in a horse trough.

The last note of The Beatles’ A Day In The Life is so high that only dogs can hear it.

During the launch of BBC2 in 1964, a kangaroo got stuck in a lift at Television Centre.

For the last 70 years, the average price of a small car has remained the same as the cost of 20,000 Mars Bars.

When Monty Python toured the US and were asked to trash a hotel suite for publicity, Michael Palin obligingly went into the bathroom and broke a toothbrush.

There are 400,000 species of plants on Earth. 300,000 are safe to eat, but we actually only eat fewer than 200.

As a small boy, Roald Dahl made a pilgrimage to see Beatrix Potter. When he got there, all she said was: “Well, you’ve seen her. Now, buzz off !”

The only difference between fog and mist is visibility – if you can’t see more than 100 metres ahead, it’s fog, not mist.

A petrol station owned by Harland Sanders was the site of the first KFC in 1930. Motorists were served fried chicken at his own dining-room table.

Because of a deal struck with the Mafia, the word “mafia” was never used in The Godfather.

During the Second World War, the Allies considered dropping glue on to Nazi troops to make them stick to the ground.

The lives of Cher, Elizabeth Taylor and Ronald Reagan were all saved by the Heimlich manoeuvre.

Since the first crew left for the International Space Station on October 31, 2000, there has not been a single day when the entire human race has been on Earth.

Murderous frogs featured on Victorian Christmas cards, along with children being boiled in teapots and mice riding lobsters.

1,342 QI Facts To Leave You Flabbergasted is published by Faber at £9.99 for hardback.