“Facts are stupid things,” President Ronald Reagan told the Republican National Convention in 1988. And in the six years I’ve been compiling the “In Fact” column for Prospect, there has been the odd moment when I’ve felt the same. Yet for the most part we tend to revere facts; they drive scientific development, they fuel political debate, they fill up amusing books like this one. (Even Reagan, a president not known for his firm grip on reality, liked facts: he had meant to tell his fellow Republicans that they were “stubborn” things; it just came out wrong.)
A fact can, of course, be a slippery thing. Shorn of context, it can lend undeserved authority to a shoddy opinion; artfully combined with other carefully selected facts, it can crowd out dissent. And despite our claims to the contrary, it’s not always so clear that we respect facts. Nine times out of ten, if someone writes in to Prospect accusing us of getting our facts wrong, they actually turn out to be flustered not about the facts themselves, but what we’ve done with them.
The “In Fact” column traces its ancestry back to the very first issues of Prospect. It was inspired by the famous “Index” from the American monthly magazine Harper’s, which combines a string of thematically connected facts, usually numerical, to cajole the reader into seeing the world the Harper’s way. “In Fact”, on the other hand, holds the facts themselves in esteem: their neutrality, their seriousness, occasionally their weirdness.
It is, admittedly, insulated from criticism by its cunning device of always attributing facts to their sources (although the eagle-eyed reader may on occasion pause over the meaning of “Prospect research”). We have taken a rather “third-way” approach to the question of whether the facts themselves are true, triangulating between old-fashioned objectivism and postmodern relativism. “In Fact” is, ironically, the only section of the magazine which isn’t fact-checked, but at the same time we aim only to feature facts which have at least the whiff of truth about them. More importantly, rather like Prospect itself, the column cleaves to no particular ideology and seeks only to publish the original, the provocative and the stimulating (and, now and then, the crude).
If “In Fact” has ever aimed to do anything beyond amuse and astound, it is perhaps to get you to see the world slightly differently. For instance, does it not present the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in a different light when you realise that the areas under dispute—the West Bank and the Gaza strip—are roughly the same size as, respectively, Lincolnshire and Sheffield? Or what about the strange shock to one’s historical sense that comes from learning that Galileo was offered an academic seat at Harvard (he turned it down, the snob)?
Prospect readers often tell me that “In Fact” is the part of the magazine they turn to first each month. In my early days at Prospect, as an editorial assistant with little influence over the rest of the magazine, I got a real kick out of comments like this. I was even known to get carried away and exclaim that “In Fact” represented the “essence” of Prospect; after all, didn’t articles sometimes get edited down to short diary items, and didn’t diary items sometimes get compressed into single facts?
Still, this hubris didn’t prepare me for what happened one day in early 2003. We were putting the February issue of Prospect to bed; it was 1am, the magazine had to go to press that night and, as usual, I was floundering around for facts to fill the column. Desperate to allow my superiors to get to bed, I turned my weary hands to the fact source of last resort: Google. A search for, I think, “interesting facts” led me to an American student’s personal website. And there, nestling like a pearl among photos of boozy nights out and lists of favourite bands, I saw it: “Most toilets flush in the key of E flat.” Perfect. My saviour would not qualify as a credible source, alas (I hadn’t invented “Prospect research” yet ); I was forced to seek out a mainstream alternative and Google (again) helped me to find it in the form of the slightly sinister-sounding US “Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.” Job done.
The issue came out as usual a few days later. I was taking a well-deserved day off and enjoying a lie-in when I was woken by the squeal of my mobile phone. I answered blearily and found myself in conversation with an excitable producer from Johnny Vaughan Tonight who wanted to know everything about the toilet fact: where did I get it from? Was it really true? Had I verified it? I patiently directed her to the disease control website and went back to sleep, pleased to have discovered that the long arms of “In Fact” stretched as far as prime-time chat shows.
Later that day, idly flicking through the Guardian, I was brought up short by the paper’s third leading article. Entitled ‘Closet composers,’ it was an elegant meditation on the question of whether the fact that toilets flush in E flat, as revealed in Prospect, could shed new light on the provenance of some of history’s musical masterpieces. (Wagner apparently once claimed that the opening passage of the Ring cycle, a sustained E flat in the double basses, was inspired by a dream in which he had heard the sound of “swiftly running water.”)
Already buoyed by the day’s brace of triumphs, I made it a hat-trick in the evening when Mark Lawson’s Front Row decided to send a musicologist armed with a tuning fork into the toilets of Broadcasting House to test the veracity of the claim. (I wasn’t exactly surprised when it turned out to be hokum.) So there you go: the power of one “fact” to set the day’s news agenda. And it didn’t stop there—by now the fact seemed to have entered the collective consciousness, and pops up now and then even now. A couple of years ago it cropped up in an advertising campaign for Classic FM, and apparently it even made it on to the David Letterman Show in the US.
The days of late-night fact scrambles are long gone. These days my fact antennae are finely honed. So much so, in fact, that while I was editing the fact selection for this book, I sometimes found myself saying to myself, “How interesting, must remember that for the column.” But such assiduousness can bear fruit: I might be having a chat in the pub, someone will say, “Did you know…” and instantly I’m on fact alert—if the claim is interesting and can be corroborated, it’s in. Some of my friends also act as my eyes and ears—plenty of the facts in this book owe their appearance to such diligence.
To preserve the serendipity of the “In Fact” column, where a fact about farts might snuggle up next to one about trade deficits, the facts in this book are for the most part organised not by subject matter but by, for want of a better term “effect.” So the first chapter contains facts that are likely to go down well at a dinner party; the second facts that aim to change your perspective on things you thought you knew about, and so on. Hope you enjoy them.
