In fact

August 26, 2006
  • 27 per cent of English adults bought at least one England flag in June. [The Guardian, 12th July 2006]


  • One third of Spaniards believe General Franco was right to overthrow the Republican government in the 1930s. [El Mundo, 18th July 2006]


  • George Bernard Shaw, Laurence Olivier, Prince Charles and John Prescott all declined invitations to appear on Desert Island Discs. [Sunday Times, 2nd July 2006]


  • In 1995 there were 225 television programmes in Britain watched by more than 15m people. In 2004, there were just ten. [Jack Straw speech, LSE]


  • Aldous Huxley died on the same day JFK was assassinated in 1963. [New Yorker, 26th June 2006]


  • Of the 18 US presidents since 1900, only seven went, as undergraduates, to an Ivy League institution. Harry Truman never went to college at all. [Times Literary Supplement, 12th July 2006]


  • Galileo was offered a seat at Harvard University. [The Right Nation by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge]


  • Two thirds of people in Northern Ireland are now opposed to the Good Friday agreement. [Sunday Times, 9th July 2006]


  • In 2001 there was not a single traffic light in the Palestinian territories. [New York Review of Books, 22nd June 2006]


  • Suicide is the biggest killer among young Chinese. It accounts for a third of all deaths among rural women. [Marginal Revolution]


  • Jack Bauer, the character from the television series 24, has personally killed 112 people. [The Guardian, 8th July 2006]


  • A third of patent applications in America in 1905 were related in some way to the bicycle. [RSA Journal, Winter 2005]


  • The five most-used nouns in the English language are time, person, year, way and day. [CNN, 22nd June 2006]