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Never in the field of human trivia ...

By Mark Mason on 23-01-15 12:46. Comments (1)

The 50th anniversary of Churchill's death has produced some very moving pieces about the great man's role in history. Quite right too, of course - but we shouldn't forget that he was also a one-man trivia factory, leading a life crammed full of fascinating details. Here, in no particular order, are a dozen of my favourite Churchillian facts:

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Books

Walks

Inspired by my book Walk the Lines: the London Underground - Overground, each of these trivia-packed walks uncovers London’s history by following a section of a Tube line ... at street level.
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Quizzes

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Magical Thinking

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Content

Rubik's Cube

A Rubik’s cube has more combinations than light travels inches in a century. This is my favourite illustration of how a very small number of factors can produce an absurdly complicated situation. A silly little toy, with only three squares in each of its three dimensions. How can that get complicated? Well, as anyone who's ever tried to solve one just by guessing will tell you, it gets very complicated. The number of possible combinations is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000. Forget billions - that's 43 quintillion and change. (In fact the cube's manufacturers just said ‘billions' in their advertising, figuring that no one would know what a quintillion was. It's a billion billion.) The number of inches light travels in a century, meanwhile, is a mere 37,165,049,856,000,000,000. Or thereabouts.