What is the most-read publication in the UK? Tesco magazine.

The first country to ban foie gras on the grounds of cruelty was in Nazi Germany.

These are just a few of the astonishing and entertaining facts compiled by the QI team in a brand new book. Following ‘1,227 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off’, the QI team returns with a second fat stack of facts. In addition to the new book, the BBC TV show was back on screens for its 11th series in September, along with a sixth series of QI’s sister radio show The Museum of Curiosity.

The hit panel game QI first aired on the BBC in September 2003 with John Lloyd producing and John Mitchinson in charge of the research, they co wrote this book. There are now more than 100 editions of the programme.

The writers set themselves the goal of producing 1,000 nuggets of information that stood out over the years. After the first book, there was still an abundance of material so the writers banded together to write a second.

The book pools 10 years of extraordinary comparisons (there are 1,000 times as many bacteria in your gut as there are stars in the Milky Way); astonishing statistics (a single male human produces enough sperm in two weeks to impregnate every fertile woman on the planet); unexpected truths (the Bible is the most shoplifted book in the United States) and memorable absurdities (Richard Gere’s middle name is Tiffany).

John Mitchinson is the co author of ‘1,339 QI Facts to Make Your Jaw Drop’ and a writer and director of Research for QI. He joined Sean on the Moncreiff show this afternoon.

Here are some of the strangest and most startling facts that you can find in the book:

• In ancient China, panda fur was used for sanitary towels
• Women spend 16 months of their lives crying
• The offspring of a polar bear and a grizzly bear is called a pizzly bear. Or sometimes a grolar bear.
• At any one time, 45 million people in the world are drunk.
• Buckingham Palace is built on the site of a brothel.
• Earthworms have five hearts.
• If Jane Austen hadn’t broken off her engagement, she would have been known as Mrs Harris Bigg-Wither.
• 40 million people in China live in caves.
• There is only one sneeze in the Bible.
• One in ten women cares more for a fictitious male character than her actual partner.
• Air trapped inside hedgehogs can make them blow up like a balloon. They should be carefully deflated with a syringe before they burst.
• The dinosaur noises in JurassicPark were made from recordings of tortoises having sex..
• Splenda was an insecticide that became a sweetener when a lab assistant misheard an instruction to “test it” as “taste it”.
• The Arabic word for “nipple” is buzz.
• Hewlett Packard printer ink is 20 times more expensive than 2003 Dom Perignon.
• In Britain, spiders outnumber people by more than 500,000 to 1.

For more facts: http://qi.com/