The new volume of Mr Lubbock's miscellany unravels 100 years of baffling curiosities and "ice-breaker" stories with an awake and critical spirit that will make you shine at any dinner party among friends. An essential companion to 20th century history.

A summary of useless knowledge or how to shine at dinner parties of friends. Facts, stories, fait divers and amusing aspects of history, politics, geography, personalities, science, curiosities, arts, culture, apophenies, uselessness.

The 20th century began and ended with a bang. The century of the people, of the abyss of the greatest horrors, of inventions that changed the world and of discoveries that explained it a little better, of agents of the vilest cowardice and of women and men of indefectible courage, will go down in history also for its little stories. Year by year, Mr. Lubbock unravels 100 years of baffling curiosities and ice-breaking stories to serve at a dinner table with strangers.

An almanac with an awake and critical spirit that sheds light on civil rights struggles to the detriment of other, more warlike ones and restores to fair memory characters shunned from the compendiums for carrying the inconvenient double XX chromosome or for displaying a skin tone outside the Pantone exclusive that allowed some elected officials to go down in history.