- Nearly one third of British corporation tax is paid by the financial services sector. [Prospect, page 52]
- India has just 1 per cent of the world's vehicles but about 10 per cent of annual road fatalities. [Financial Times, 10th April 2007
- Franz Liszt received so many requests for a lock of his hair from fans that he bought a dog and snipped off patches of fur to send to his admirers. [Condensed Knowledge: A deliciously Irreverent Guide to Feeling Smart Again, published by Mental Floss.]
- The going rate for the tooth fairy in Britain is £1.05, compared to 17p 25 years ago. The price of teeth has risen over three times as quickly as the cost of living. [Daily Telegraph, 27th June 2007]
- In the US, holes dug in the sand to make sandcastles have accounted for more fatalities (16) since 1990 than shark attacks (12). [The Guardian, 22nd June 2007]
- Gordon Brown is the first university-educated prime minister since Stanley Baldwin not to attend Oxford. [Sutton Trust]
- When Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, he ordered all Monopoly sets to be destroyed. [Hasbro]
- In Britain, 1.3 per cent of lorry drivers are female and 2 per cent from ethnic minorities. [BBC News, 3rd July 2007]
- The Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, and thus the creation of the atomic bomb, while waiting at a traffic light on Southampton Row, London—just around the corner from the current location of the Prospect offices. [The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World by Kati Marton]
- Scotland has the highest proportion of redheads in the world: 13 per cent of Scots have red hair and 40 per cent carry the recessive ginger gene. [The Observer, 8th July 2007]
- 14 per cent of US teenagers who call themselves "evangelical" or "born again" have had three or more sexual partners by age 17, compared to 9 per cent of those who call themselves mainstream Protestants. [Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers by Mark Regnerus]
- The 10 Downing Street door has always been black, except for a period during the premiership of Herbert Asquith (1908-16), when it was painted dark green. [Daily Telegraph, 2nd June 2007]
- Only 15 per cent of Estonians believe in God, making them the least religious nation in the EU. [Metro, 6th June 2007]
- Ethiopia's calendar is more than seven years behind that of the rest of the world. It is still officially 1999 and Ethiopians are planning to hold millennium celebrations in September. [BBC News,
- 3rd June 2007]
- Last year, the Swedish town of Sodertalje took in twice as many Iraqi refugees as the entire US. [New York Times, 13th June 2007]
- The 1922 film Nosferatu credited 16 people; The Matrix Revolutions (2003) 701. [The Observer Book of Film]
- Venezuela has the highest per capita murder rate in the world.[Foreign Policy, May/June 2007]
- The closest living relative of the tyrannosaurus rex is the chicken. [The Guardian, 13th April 2007]
- "Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand and "lollipop" with the right. [The Urban Dictionary]
