Definitely loo reading, Hartston's wilful mass of useless information is listed number by number until 216, then more sporadically to 5,671,350,435,227 (dollars of US national debt to December 1999). But who cares that there were 97 baseball riots in the US between 1960 and 1972 - the predominant tenor of the information? Very occasionally, it throws up an interesting fact (Mozart composed 202 hours of music; 1,686 televisions per square kilometre in Singapore) while others are tantalisingly incomplete (1,056 deaths on passenger flights in 1997; 487 cars per thousand people in the US). Others are hard to believe - only 483 cinemas in Britain? - or hard to gauge, like that the word "Bible" appears zero times in Shakespeare. He cites the odd arithmetical curiosity, but really, this is mental diced carrots, and I couldn't find anywhere the number of pounds he was advanced to write it.