I Used to Know That: Stuff You Forgot from School [Hardcover]

"could help you connect with your childhood, boost your brainpower and remind your kids just how clever you are" --Irish News, July 2008

"It covers everything we should remember from school but don't" --The Western Mail, 24 June 2008

"amusing but useful... I am not the only one planning to keep it on my desk to avoid any intellectually embarrassing moments" --The Scotsman, July 2008

"[an] entertaining rag-bag of a book, a sort of cocktail of half-remembered things from your schooldays" --Birmingham Evening Mail, September 2008

A fun and witty collection of snippets of information we 'used to know' from school.

it is a fascinating read and you might even learn a few things you missed out on first time around.

In the same series as the hugely popular I Before E (Except After C), this is an absorbing volume of familiar facts and figures you may well have forgotten... If the answers are just out of reach, but you know them really, this is the book for you.

"a droll personal audit of how much - or how little - of school learning lingers on into later life... it is not only fun to dip into, it is a mine of useful information... It's all there, easily found, clearly laid out."

"This is a fascinating book... it will no doubt be a great source of entertainment around many a dinner table during the festive season"

If you've forgotten the capital city of Chile; the basics of osmosis; how to solve a quadratic equation; the names of the Bennet sisters in "Pride and Prejudice"; who wrote the famous poem about daffodils; the use of a conjunction or the number of continents in the world, "I Used to Know That" will provide all the answers. A light-hearted and informative reminder of all the things that we learnt in school but have since become relegated to the backs of our minds, "I Used to Know That" features hundreds of important snippets of wisdom, facts, theories, equations, phrases, rules and sayings.It is a practical guide to turn to when an answer is eluding you, when helping a child with homework or preparing them for the new school year, or maybe just to brush up on trivia for the pub quiz. "I Used to Know That" covers English Language and Literature, Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, History, Geography and General Studies, so never again will you find yourself stumped!

In the same series as the bestselling I Before E (Except After C) and My Grammar and I (Or should it be Me?)

When I started to think about this book, I thought I remembered quite a lot of stuff. After all, I do crosswords and pub quizzes and nobody will play Trivial Pursuit with me. But when I got down to writing it, I realised that I only sort of remembered. I thought I knew what photosynthesis was, until I tried to explain it. When I ran the maths chapter past a friend with a maths degree, I discovered I didn't even know what pi was. I couldn't remember what happened at the end of Wuthering Heights and had to confess that I had never read War and Peace (which was a bit embarrassing, as it turns out to be my publisher's favourite book). To make matters worse, the more I talked to people about what I might put in the book, the more I realised that we had all forgotten different things. I spoke to an American friend who said that she had certainly once known the names of all the presidents and the capitals of all the states; I had a conversation with another friend who she suddenly felt the need to ask me what a square root was. In the end I had to stop asking people, or the book would have been three times the length. Even so, we had to cut a couple of my editor Silvia's favourite bits, so she and I are hoping it will be a success so that we can do Volume 2.

Caroline Taggart was born in London of Scottish parents, spent her childhood in New Zealand and went to university in Sheffield. Confused for some time, she has now lived in Pimlico for 25 years and thinks of herself as a Londoner, but continues to change allegiance whenever it suits her, particularly during the rugby season.

She has worked in publishing for nearly 30 years, the last 18 of them as a freelance editor of non-fiction. She has edited innumerable natural history titles, notably Jonathan Scott's Big Cat Diary books and the tie-in to the BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs, as well as books on gardening, cookery, health, witchcraft, pop music, the Blitz, the D-Day landings, the workings of the House of Commons and the English language. She has also written a handbook for mature students and an encyclopedia of dogs and is the editor of Writer's Market UK 2009. She has forgotten at least 90% of everything she has ever known about any of these subjects, which makes her an ideal person to write this book.