How Could He Do It?
by Emma Charles

‘In many ways we were an ordinary family: mum, dad, two kids, three dogs, one rabbit, two guinea pigs. I stayed at home, studying with the Open University, and dad worked, and the kids went to private schools. We lived in a rather nice semi in a rather nice area of Edinburgh, with a rather nice Volvo in the drive, and took rather nice holidays, wearing rather nice clothes. I loved Daniel deeply and I thought – no, I was sure – he loved me deeply, too. And we both loved our kids deeply (I thought). And that was as it should be. We had it made.

In some ways we weren't a completely ordinary family. There was Daniel, for one; he worked for most of the time we were married as a ship's engineer, and so he was away from home for up to four months and then home on leave for up to two. And Tamsin, our fifteen-year-old daughter, had specific learning difficulties.

But I'm pretty ordinary: an unlikely heroine. I am disabled because of back problems. I'm pretty fat – I've put on a lot of weight through lack of exercise and, yes, comfort-eating! Not the stuff of movies.

But I never for a moment dreamt that my family was all that extraordinary – until that day when Tamsin broke down and told me that her father, my loving husband, had been sexually abusing her.’

I Am Justice: A Journey Out of Africa
by Paul Kenyon

Eighty miles off the Libyan coast water is leaking rapidly into the bottom of a dilapidated wooden boat. Twenty-seven men, crammed in side-by-side, desperately attempt to bail it out, but the boat is sinking. In the distance one of their number spots a ship and, forcing the last moments of life from the engine, they move towards it. But the crew refuses to allow them on board. Instead the men scramble onto the floats of a huge industrial tuna net, and watch as their boat rolls over and disappears into the heaving Mediterranean.

Like tens of thousands of others Justice set off from his rural village with an idealised vision of an new life in England – the 'home' country – desperate just to earn his way and help his orphaned brother and sister left behind. During his long journey to the African coast, he’s captured, jailed and tortured, before escaping and heading northwards again. Once in Tripoli he’s duped into handing over his life savings for a trip in a wreck of a boat across miles of open sea to almost certain death. But there is also compassion here and he meets old and wise souls along the way.

The tuna net is not the end of Justice's story. It is an extraordinary tale of courage, and an important account of a life caught between cultures, on the edge of survival.

I Am Justice: A Journey Out of Africa
by Paul Kenyon

Eighty miles off the Libyan coast water is leaking rapidly into the bottom of a dilapidated wooden boat. Twenty-seven men, crammed in side-by-side, desperately attempt to bail it out, but the boat is sinking. In the distance one of their number spots a ship and, forcing the last moments of life from the engine, they move towards it. But the crew refuses to allow them on board. Instead the men scramble onto the floats of a huge industrial tuna net, and watch as their boat rolls over and disappears into the heaving Mediterranean.

Like tens of thousands of others Justice set off from his rural village with an idealised vision of an new life in England – the 'home' country – desperate just to earn his way and help his orphaned brother and sister left behind. During his long journey to the African coast, he’s captured, jailed and tortured, before escaping and heading northwards again. Once in Tripoli he’s duped into handing over his life savings for a trip in a wreck of a boat across miles of open sea to almost certain death. But there is also compassion here and he meets old and wise souls along the way.

The tuna net is not the end of Justice's story. It is an extraordinary tale of courage, and an important account of a life caught between cultures, on the edge of survival.

In Fact
by Prospect

‘Prospect magazine is the sharpest, wittiest and increasingly the most important journal of opinion in Britain’

Social Standing
One in every 3,400 Americans is an Elvis impersonator. * By law, every child in Belgium must take harmonica lessons. * Lauren Bacall and Shimon Peres are first cousins. * 5.8 per cent of people ever born are alive today. * Each successive monarch faces in a different direction on British coins. * When India's Sachin Tendulkar bats against Pakistan in test matches, the television audience in India exceeds the total population of Europe. * Queen Victoria spoke Urdu and Hindi. * The word 'boredom' did not exist in the English language until after 1750. * Peanuts are used as an ingredient in dynamite. * Of all heart attacks, around 6 per cent occur during sexual intercourse. Of these, 90 per cent happen during extramarital sex. * In 1949, there were 160,000 young Conservatives; today, there are 3,000.

Think again.
A third of the world's obese people live in developing countries. * Hitler was on the shortlist for the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize. * In 2002 the Amazon rainforest still covered 87 per cent of its 1950s footprint. * Only ten of 55 Democratic senators voted to empower President Bush to use the US army in the first Gulf war in 1991. Had three or more followed the party line and voted against, Bush would have lost the Senate vote. * At 365 square kilometres, the Gaza strip is slightly smaller than Sheffield. * In the 1930s, the Inland Revenue investigated Yeats's tax returns because they could not believe a poet of his stature had sales that were so small. * In 1998 of 106 daily newspapers in Canada, Conrad Black owned 62. * Per capita, the biggest arms exporter in the world is the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Sweden is second, Jordan third and Norway fourth. * By the age of five, children have acquired 85 per cent of the language they will have as adults.

And as they are all credited, you know whom to blame.

In Fact
by Prospect

‘Prospect magazine is the sharpest, wittiest and increasingly the most important journal of opinion in Britain’

‘Facts are stupid things,’ Ronald Reagan told the Republican National Convention in 1988. And in the six years I've been compiling the ‘In fact’ column for Prospect, I have occasionally felt the same. Yet for the most part we tend to revere facts; they drive scientific development, they fuel political debate, they fill up amusing books. A fact can be a slippery thing. Shorn of context, it can lend undeserved authority to a shoddy opinion; artfully combined with other facts, it can crowd out dissent. And it is not always clear that we do respect the things. Nine times out of ten, if someone accuses you of getting your facts wrong, what they’re actually saying is that they don't like what you’ve done with them.


The facts in this book will aim to amuse and astound, and sometimes even to change the way you see the world. For instance, does it not present the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in a different light when you realise that the West Bank and the Gaza strip are roughly the same size as, respectively, Lincolnshire and Sheffield? What about the strange shock to one’s historical sense that comes from learning that Galileo was offered an academic seat at Harvard?