Reviewed by Ian Lipke
Riley Knight is the host of a popular podcast, called Half-Arsed History. Despite the publisher’s assurance that Knight’s stories are true, the joking approach of the author requires one to take care when deciding which elements of each story are true. The book highlights the many and varied ways that people have met their end over the years, from the foolish to the absurd.
The book carries a substantial selection of incidents. As the blurb accompanying the text reports, readers can choose from a wide selection of deaths. “From a classical Greek playwright killed by a tortoise dropping out of the sky to an ancient Chinese duke falling into a toilet; from a Viking raider bitten by a severed head to a lawyer shooting himself to prove a legal point; from two French kings killed by door frames to two British parliamentarians who were killed by turnips—there are countless amusing, farcical, absurd, and ultimately very strange deaths from across history. History’s Strangest Deaths offers fifty of the best of them, spanning thousands of years of history to recent times.”
One can almost see the author’s tongue pressed firmly against his cheek as he makes the point that many people are supremely unimaginative in death, embracing the tired old cliché of dying peacefully in their sleep surrounded by loved ones. The Introduction sets the tone. When the author argues that death has shown considerable staying power in that, throughout the course of human history, most people have tried death once, and nobody has returned to complain. Moreover, statistically speaking, death is more popular now than at any time in history.
Knight is very clever when he writes. There is more than sufficient serious material to suggest that all his writings can be accepted. When he writes about Agrippina:
And get ahead she certainly did: at the apex of her career, she was one of the most powerful people in the Roman Empire (40),
he presents a long-accepted view. When presenting her actual death, he follows history except to add the quip, that her own son relied on a ham-fisted and poorly executed attempt [on her life]. Perhaps the apple did fall some distance from the tree after all.
One of Knight’s anecdotes is undoubtedly true but is written as an exercise in comicry. This is the tale of Sir Billy Snedden. For those who knew Snedden in person, it is true to say that he was a man, not known to shine in his leader’s government. Sir Robert Menzies must have seen something of value in him to lead to Snedden’s holding the portfolios of Immigration and Labour and National Service but must have rued the day his Minister described anti-war protestors as “political bikies pack-raping democracy”. More was to follow with Knight’s description of his final act worth recording.
Knight’s brief stories make up a light-hearted collection, perhaps unique in its scope. Well worth reading.
History’s Strangest Deaths
(2025)
by Riley Knight
Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 978-1-76147-258-9
$29.99; 269 pp