The Rabbit Hole Book

by Richard Coles, Charles Spencer, Cat Jarman

A WARREN OF WEIRD AND WONDERFUL FACTS ANF TALES RESCUED FROM OBSCURITY


The first trivia book from the team behind the hit history podcast The Rabbit Hole Detectives, investigating the provenance of historical objects, real and metaphorical, with intelligence and humour

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Ever fallen down a rabbit hole?

Ever got lost chasing a fact, a hunch or a curious piece of cultural ephemera?

Then the Rabbit Hole Detectives – Richard Coles, Cat Jarman and Charles Spencer – are here to do the burrowing for you.

Why were eight WWII Hurricane fighter planes buried in Ukraine?

What have chimpanzees to do with the invention of toilet paper?

How many dynamite sticks should not be used to blow up a whale?

Which ancient civilisation liked a short tongue and a shaved head?

Written to accompany the unforgettable hit podcast, The Rabbit Hole Book follows Richard, Cat and Charles as they investigate and elucidate weird and wonderful curiosities from history, telling stories that are as often dumbfounding as they are gripping, as unexpected as they are hilarious or deeply moving.

What are you waiting for?

Welcome to the warren . . .

Whatever you think you know, guess again.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Trivia, Audiobook

337 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 10, 2024

About the author

The Reverend Richard Coles (born 26 March 1962) is a Church of England priest, broadcaster, writer and musician. Richard Coles was born in Northampton, England and educated at the independent Wellingborough School (where he was a choirboy)and at the South Warwickshire College of Further Education, Department of Drama and the Liberal Arts. He is known for having been the multi-instrumentalist who partnered Jimmy Somerville in the 1980s band The Communards, which achieved three Top Ten hits. He later attended King's College London where he studied theology from 1990. Richard Coles co-presents Saturday Live on BBCR4. In January 2011 The Reverend Richard Coles was appointed as the parish priest of St Mary the Virgin, Finedon in the Diocese of Peterborough.

Reviews

[Helen Kellerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quirky! I loved it.

[Sifa Poulton · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

THE RABBIT HOLE BOOK is an interesting collection of mini-essays.

It is a very interesting collection of topics covered by the book. It ranges from the pre-historic to the modern era. There are military objects and events alongside quirky people to everyday household objects. "Misc." is really the best phrase to categorise it all, meaning that there's probably certain topics that will particularly interest you - and vary from others who read it (which makes this a very interesting book for my book club to have picked!)

The fact that there are three authors also means that you can play a little game of "guess the author". The contents and the end of each mini-essay tells you who it is so you can check and see how well you're doing. I quite liked that (unintentional) gamification aspect of it (probably because I did pretty well!) It also means you might get a preference for certain author's work after a while - either due to their style of the topics they choose (mine was Cat Jarman because there was less modern-era stuff in hers).

I did feel like these weren't really rabbit holes. As someone who goes down a lot of rabbit holes, I was expecting a lot of detail into these topics. However, with a sub-400 page book and 99 topics, there just isn't space for this. Instead, there are only 3-4 pages, which just isn't a rabbit hole for me. For some of the topics, in particular, there just wasn't enough space. I mean, the Pilgrimage of Grace can barely be described in the 4 pages it gets.

[Crazyjamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A genuinely difficult one to rate. There will no doubt be some who just get hooked by this book. I will admit that the entries are all well written, and with them being so short you can just very easily move from one to the next. In theory, this should have been right up my street. And yet, I struggled to finish it. I just found too many of the entries to be aimless without really imparting obvious knowledge or even telling an entertaining story. And whilst I do appreciate that the nature of the book is that a lot of the entries will be obscure, many are very obscure, again to the point where I wasn’t particularly interested to read them.

There are some exceptions. I can think of five off the top of my head that I really did enjoy, and the story of the exploding whale was so good that I added an extra star for it. But at the same time, that one entry shows how good the book could have been if more of the entries were of that quality and that interesting. The fact that they’re not is perhaps the best explanation I can give as to why this just didn’t grab me. Honestly I much preferred Tim Harford’s Fifty Things and Next Fifty Things books, which are written in a similar style but I found to be focused and consistently interesting. Still sticking at three stars though, because even though this book wasn’t for me overall, I readily accept that others will enjoy it, and I don’t really want to put those people off.

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I am a big fan of Qi and interesting quirky facts, and this book certainly had loads of fun, interesting, and odd facts, and the authors read the audio which was nice, I wished though that they had put the posts in some kind of 'order' like topics, as it was just a bunch of random stories and facts which were fine, but I felt like I was a bit all over the place. Still, if you are a fan of Qi, or just fun facts, this is the book for you. Hopefully they will do more. Suitable for teens and adults.

[Beachcomber · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded down. By necessity brief, each chapter is made briefer still by often mentioning several examples of each topic, e.g. guard dogs starts with South African boerboels, but you then move on to German Shepherds, Cane Corso, etc. It’s very much an overview of everything rather than anything in depth.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun and very interesting book. So many topics are covered and all are fascinating. I learn a lot from the Rabbit Hole Detectives. As great as the book is, I do prefer the podcast. It is just so much fun listening to these three discuss their topics. Highly recommend both.

[Luke · Rating 1 out of 5]

Richard Coles is perhaps the worst writer on planet Earth. How can every word be so dull? I started reading chapters and could tell immediately that he wrote them, and just skipped them. Because who has the time. Dreadful.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun and enjoyable read, literally 99 little rabbit holes to fall into. Many fascinating and interesting subjects. I enjoyed most and learned about many things I hadn't known before like the Westminster Abbey effigies.

An enjoyable book to dip in and out of.

[Mr John W Palmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good quirky essays

Well written and interesting essays . All three authors write authoritatively and keep you interested through the essays . Worth reading

[Steph Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun and low stakes pop-history read. Very GB-centric but I like that. Enjoyable and didn’t ask anything from me.

[Donna Hayman · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much fun highly recommended

[Kasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book of trivia, a bit difficult to rate as I feel I'm just rating whether or not I found the facts interesting - well, a week on and I don't seem to recall any of them, so I guess 3 stars?

[Michelle Fletcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A down the rabbit hole we go, a fun look at the weird, funny and down right odd little facts from the past, short informative chapters with a tale for everyone.