The Know-It-All

On leaving school or university, you feel pretty pleased with yourself. You've learnt a lot. You've erudite, well-read, and know a whole bunch of facts guaranteed at some stage to appear in the questions on Mastermind or University Challenge. Then you pet a job, and ten years later you know more about Britney and Big Brother than Beckett and the Brontës. Sound familiar? Well, it happened to A.J. Jacobs too. As an editor at Esquire, he built up an impressive knowledge of celebrity trivia - and the cure was going to take some time. While others might read a broadsheet at the weekend, Jacobs chose to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. All 33,000 pages of it...