The Book of the Dead (56 page)

William Blake

Peter Ackroyd,
Blake
(Sinclair Stevenson, 1995)

William Blake,
The Poetry & Prose of William Blake
, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1927) Marsha Keith Schuchard,
Why Mrs. Blake Cried
(Century, 2006)

Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill,
Utilitarianism & Other Essays
, ed. Alan Ryan (Penguin, 2004) Leslie Stephen,
The Utilitarians
(London, 1900)

Richard Buckminster Fuller

J. Baldwin,
Bucky Works: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today
(J. Wiley & Sons, 1996) R. Buckminster Fuller,
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
(Lars Müller Publishers, 2008) Anyone who would like to offer corrections or get specific sources is welcome to visit the special forum on the QI website:
www.qi.com/talk/bookofthedead
.

No book of this kind could be written without a crack team of researchers. For this project, three of them went well beyond the usual call of duty. Tim Ecott and James Harkin, as well as providing meticulous research notes on a host of lives, also wrote early drafts of some of the chapters, while Andy Murray, like a demented literary bodysnatcher, produced a constant stream of the freshly researched dead for our consideration.

Piers Fletcher, Molly Oldfield, Justin Pollard, Mat Coward, Dan Schreiber, Arron Ferster, and Will Bowen also added the odd corpse to the pile, as did Xander Cansell and Tibor Fischer. Special thanks must go to Catriona Luke, who raided the obituary cupboards at several large newspapers.

Thomas Edison once wrote that, “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.” The team at Crown are the most elegant hustlers in the business. Particular thanks must go to John Glusman, Shaye Areheart, Dyana Messina, and Domenica Alioto. It’s an honor to be part of their list.

Special thanks are due to our wives, Sarah Lloyd and Rachael Kerr, but this book is dedicated to our children, Harry, Claudia, Caitlin, Stella, George, Hamish, and Rory, for reminding us daily that life really is the thing.