Sounds daft, but I buy this book every year. This is the ultimate reference book, detailing stuff from astronomy to weights and measures via government, religion, countries of the world, rulers, events, currencies, guilds, magazines, the Beaufort scale etc. I cannot think of a time when I needed to know a statistic and failed to find it here.

Want to know when Dick Whittington was Mayor of London? The address of The Orcadian paper? How many people died of malaria 3 years ago? National song of Uzbekistan? This will tell you. Great for browsing through too.

If you like to know things just because you can, this is essential reading. Oh, and to top it all, there's a quiz each year whose answers are found somewhere in the depths of the book. It's what keeps me sane over the regular chaos that is Christmas.

So why only 4 stars?... because if you want the same level of detail about Scotland, you have to buy Whitaker's Scottish Almanack too.