Giles Milton & Gordon Turnbull (15:15)

Who ate the last dodo, who really killed Rasputin and where did Agatha Christie mysteriously disappear to in 1926?

In the impeccably researched Fascinating Footnotes from History, Giles Milton, master of historical narrative, details one hundred of the quirkiest historical nuggets; eye-stretching stories that read like fiction but are one hundred per cent fact, spanning twenty centuries and six continents and peopled with a gallery of spies, rogues, cannibals, adventurers and slaves.

Gordon Turnbull, editor of the Yale Boswell Editions, lived in the crowded variety of James Boswell’s world for a quarter of a century, immersed in the treasure trove of personal papers Boswell left behind as background to the foreground of his published biographical masterworks, and will share some of the nuggets these papers yield. What was it like for an Ayrshire clergyman to find himself the target of Robert Burns’s satire? Who really saw Dr. Samuel Johnson die? Did a man called ‘Old John Frail’ really exist? And why, he asks, should 'Merry Christmas' need a footnote?

So what is the purpose of footnotes - are they an endangered literary form since they are increasingly excluded from popular nonfiction writing?

In conversation with David McClay

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