A Dictionary of Idiocy

This volume provides a light-hearted guide for the perplexed to all things trivial. Wittgenstein said that if people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever happen. As human progress depends on the continuing practice of stupidity, Stephen Bayley investigates in this book what is necessary for human progress. Some instances of stupidity are only clearly stupid after the fact such as the astonishing amount of money poured into Internet start-ups, others rely on ideas which are stupid on their own. Starting its journey with the Medieval writer Sebastian Brandt, who wrote The Ship of Follies of the World in 1509, even the perplexed will find their way through the maze of progress and common sense. An original miscellany for those who want their trivia served up with panache. The inspiration for this collection comes from Flaubert's Dictionnaire des Idees Recues , published for the first time in October 1904.