Books by James Harkin

Hunting Season: James Foley, ISIS, and the Kidnapping Campaign that Started a War

by James Harkin

Based on his groundbreaking reporting for Vanity Fair, Hunting Season is award-winning journalist James Harkin's harrowing investigation into the abduction, captivity, and execution of James Foley, at the hands of the masked militant known as "Jihadi John" (Mohammed Emwazi), and the fate of more than two-dozen other ISIS hostages.

On August 19, 2014, the jihadist rebel group known as ISIS uploaded a video to YouTube. Entitled "Message to America," the clip depicted the final moments of American journalist James Foley's life--and the gruesome aftermath of his beheading at the hands of a masked executioner. Foley's murder--and the choreographed killings that would follow--captured the world's attention, and the Islamic State's kidnapping campaign exploded into war. Hunting Season is a riveting account of how the world's newest and most powerful terror franchise came to target Western hostages, who was behind it, and why almost no one knew about it until it was too late.

1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson, James Harkin

A New York Times Bestseller

From the creators of the hugely popular BBC quiz show QI and the best-selling Book of General Ignorance: 1,227 mind-bending facts. Did you know?
• Cows moo in regional accents.
• The international dialing code for Russia is 007.
• The water in the mouth of a blue whale weighs more than its body.
• Pants are responsible for twice as many accidents as chain saws.
• Saddam Hussein's bunker was designed by the grandson of the woman who built Hitler's bunker.
• Heroin was originally sold as cough medicine.
1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off is a trove of the strangest, funniest, and most improbable tidbits of knowledge―all painstakingly researched and distilled to a brilliant and shocking clarity.

1,339 Quite Interesting Facts to Make Your Jaw Drop

by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson, James Harkin

From the creators of the hugely popular BBC quiz show QI, a brilliant sequel to their New York Times–best-selling 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off. 1,339 Quite Interesting Facts to Make Your Jaw Drop is bursting with mindboggling morsels of trivia―informative, hilarious, sometimes arcane or utterly useless, but always entertaining.
Did you know?
• Wagner only ever wore pink silk underwear.
• There are 34,000 statues of Kim Il Sung in North Korea.
• There is a cult in Malaysia that worships a giant teapot.
• Earthworms have five hearts.
• Your eyebrows renew themselves every 64 days.
• Charles Darwin's tortoise Harriet died in 2006 at the age of 176.
Every fact in this magnificent little volume has been researched with punctilious care in order to bring you the truth in its purest form.

1,411 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock You Sideways

by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson, James Harkin

A dazzling third installment of astounding new facts from the New York Times best-selling authors of 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off and 1,339 Quite Interesting Facts to Make Your Jaw Drop.
1,411 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock You Sideways is a gold mine of wide-ranging, eye-opening, brain-bursting nuggets of trivia that's impossible to put down, another "treasure trove of factoids" (National Public Radio, Weekend Edition).
Did you know? Orchids can get jet lag Lizards can't walk and breathe at the same time Frank Sinatra took a shower 12 times a day Ladybug orgasms last for 30 minutes There are 177,147 ways to tie a tie Traffic lights existed before cars The soil in your garden is 2 million years old ---

1,234 Quite Interesting Facts to Leave You Speechless

by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson, James Harkin

The New York Times best-selling authors of the QI series return with a fourth collection of mind-bending trivia.
The New York Times best-selling authors of the Quite Interesting series have made you see sideways, knocked your socks off, and left your jaw on the floor. Now John Lloyd, John Mitchinson, and James Harkin are back to offer even more―1,234, to be exact―shocking, enlightening, downright-fun facts that will leave you speechless…and pantomiming for more.
Did you know?
The Big Bang was not as loud as a Motörhead concert. Abraham Lincoln was a licensed bartender. According to the company that created her, Hello Kitty isn’t a cat. Albert Einstein’s eyeballs are in a safety deposit box in New York. McDonald’s once created bubble-gum-flavored broccoli. It is impossible to hum and whisper at the same time.
Convinced it’s all hogwash? Visit QI.com/US1234 for proof of the veracity of every fact. Want more? Check out 1,411 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock You Sideways, 1,339 Quite Interesting Facts to Make Your Jaw Drop, and 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off.

A Load of Old Balls The QI History of Sport

by James Harkin, Anna Ptaszynski

The most improbable, fascinating and endlessly entertaining sporting facts and stories, from prehistory to the present day.

Did you know that Henry VIII owned the first pair of football boots? Or that David Attenborough is responsible for yellow tennis balls?

A Load of Old Balls is the curious story of us and sport. It's about our mind-blowingly determined attempts to be the fastest, the strongest, the most skillful. In this endlessly entertaining tale of play and belonging, astonishing violence and jaw-dropping cheating, we learn what led ancient Egyptian athletes to have their spleens removed and discover why Michael Palin was disqualified from a conker tournament. Crossing millennia, continents and cultures, Harkin and Ptaszynski - the brainy researchers for BBC's QI and co-hosts of No Such Thing As A Fish - show us sport as we've never seen it before.

"The trivia book of the season . . . magnificent." SPECTATOR

** Published in hardback as Everything to Play For.