John Mitchinson

John Mitchinson is head of research for the British television panel game QI (hosted by Stephen Fry), and co-author of the QI series of books, including the million-copy seller, The Book of General Ignorance (2006) and most recently, The QI Book of the Dead (2009), a philosophical compendium of the justly famous and undeservedly forgotten. He’ll be talking about ‘Dead Men Dressed in Brown’ in the Idler’s Academy.

Educated at Oxford, he was a book publisher for 10 years before QI, managing the Harvill Press, Cassell & Co and acting as deputy publisher of the Orion Group. John is now a Vice-President of the Hay Festival, a Fellow of the RSA and Chair of the London Centre for International Storytelling. He writes a weekly QI column for the Daily Telegraph, is the restaurant critic for Spectator Business and a regular contributor to The Idler magazine. In his spare time, he keeps pigs, chickens and bees.

‘Dead Men Dressed in Brown’ is a talk on Jeremy Bentham and William Blake; two contemporaries, pioneers of inner and outer freedom who are “still relevant, still shocking and still mad”. The talk is loosely based on The QI Book of the Dead.

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