Lemmings Don't Leap - Reviewed by Roddy Lumsden

Some months back, I wrote about a new book from Chambers called Brief Encounters which detailed meetings between often unlikely contemporaries throughout history. My only quibble was that the book, one of those popular reference works pitched neatly between the light and the serious, was not long enough. So I was pleased to find the author, Edwin Moore, had done a previous book for the publisher called Lemmings Don't Leap – 180 myths, misconceptions and urban legends exploded.

The urban myth is the dime-a-dozen meme of our times. A friend of mine once churned out books of them for the chuckle market, making them up when the reports dried up. But this isn't goat down the well, poodle in the microwave material. Instead, Moore sets out to debunk (or sometimes confirm) all those things we think we know about the memories of goldfish, Camus playing for Algeria and seeing the Great Wall from space.

There is certainly plenty of familiar material here, entertainingly retold, but there were quite a few nuggets in this book which disabused me of things I had not thought to question: I didn't know that bodhrans are a modern addition to Irish music, or that Hitler was not a vegetarian (nor is the Dalai Lama we are informed and, if I can add a small debunk, nor are the majority of Indians). I also didn't know that the Kennedy / Berliner / doughnut story is a myth.

And while we are on the subject of doughnuts... I was disappointed to find that Fanny Cradock's husband's famous quip, 'may all your doughnuts turn out like Fanny's' is as apocryphal as Master Bates and Seaman Staines. Mind you, I was intrigued to find out that Johnnie Cradock was not then the TV chef's husband since they married late, after their fame and so properly, until then, Fanny ought to have still used her birth name which was the astonishing Phyllis Primrose-Peachy – a fact so ripe you half-expect to find it debunked in a future volume of this kind.

'Facts, dear children, is the new religion' I once wrote in a poem, and I read this book at the same time as I was making my way through back editions of Stephen Fry's QI on YouTube. Facts are slippery customers, often yesteryear's assumptions, lies and whitewashes warmed up, and you can tell I myself am warming up here to have a few quibbles with Edwin Moore's sponge-diving for truth. For example, though Moore and QI both remind us that a peanut no nut but a legume, they seem to differ on whether the brazil nut is a nut (Moore is wrong it seems – it's not).

A couple more very well-known debatable but quite interesting queries: who wrote Shakespeare's plays, and how many Inuit words are there for snow? The latter is really more about how you phrase the supposed fact. Moore's 'The Inuit do not have hundreds of words for snow' is correct, as is the 'The Eskimo have a hundred words for snow'. Depends on the figure and the number of languages in the equation, whether we include words which slightly change with case and so on. And let's not get started on the difference between Eskimo and Inuit, which was explained at great length to me (by an Inuit) when I once mentioned it on my trivia site once. Let's just say that Inuit is not the new word for Eskimo and move on...

...to 'Shakespeare' (the new word for Shakespeare). Now I am far from being a full-on Baconite, but I do not think Moore can boldly state that Shakespeare the actor wrote the famous plays, citing class snobbery as the reason for debate. It's part of the whole tale, but a sideshow really. When Frank Kermode, the 20^th century's most respected Shakespeare scholar retired a few years back, he began his valedictory essay by saying that after a lifetime of bardology, he thought it only 50-50 likely.

Facts, eh? Pesky. Though Moore offers us trinkets of knowledge from the worlds of nature, entertainment, the paranormal and so on, he is most at home (as in his subsequent book) when trawling the misconstruals and misconceptions of history. He is an engaging and clever creator of pop ref books and that's a fact.