Riley Knight on uncovering history's hidden characters
Riley Knight makes the case why history's forgotten figures deserve the spotlight in his new book The Most Interesting People you’ve Never Heard Of.
History is, essentially, a collection of the stories we’ve decided are worth remembering. Since the dawn of humanity, there have been over a hundred billion people, but only a vanishingly small proportion of their stories have survived. To make things worse, of those that have survived, we have a bad habit of retelling only the same few, over and over again.
Perhaps this is fair enough; usually, these are the stories of people who conquered vast continents, ruled great empires, invented exciting things that beep at you, or had the foresight and cleverness to die at precisely the right moment to be useful to one cause or another. These famous figures sit comfortably among the pages of history, secure in the knowledge that their names will be learnt by schoolchildren, carved into monuments, and used to label airports, bridges, and—if they’re really lucky—a type of food.
This book isn’t about them. Plenty of books are. This one, though, is about the people on the margins of history—those whose stories, while not quite forgotten, are nowhere near as well remembered as they should be. People whose lives were strange, fascinating, remarkable, or amusing, but who fell short of securing the combination of timing, publicity, and suitable moral instructiveness required to achieve widespread fame. They’ve instead been overshadowed by those who were larger, louder, or simply more adroit when it came to commissioning portraits.
Their stories, however, are no less interesting for their lack of notoriety. Quite the opposite, in fact: it beggars belief that some of these incredible, absurd, and captivating tales aren’t better known. From the jester who was gifted a grand manor due to the quality of his farts, to the pope who hosted orgies before selling the papacy for a lucrative sum, from the opera singer who burnt down a nunnery to rescue her girlfriend, to the prime minister who was killed and eaten by his people, this book recounts the stories of people who history remembers just well enough to illustrate that it should remember them a little better.
History is never diminished by widening its cast; on the contrary, in doing so it becomes richer, messier, and far more honest. The people featured in The Most Interesting People You've Never Heard Of may not be history’s headline acts, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have endlessly interesting stories that are well worth remembering.
The Most Interesting People You've Never Heard Of
by Riley Knight
Untold true stories of fascinating lives throughout history to the modern day from the host of the popular Half-Arsed History podcast.
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