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Fascinating, bizarre and hilarious facts about the most universal of experiences of life – birth, death and matrimony …All the female eggs needed to produce the next generation of the human race could be contained in the shell of one chicken’s egg … Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ cloakroom … Attila the Hun drank himself to death on his wedding night … in Tanzanian weddings the bride and groom sit on the lap of an old woman … Indian Chief Blackbird was buried sitting on his horse …From Roman births to Bedouin wedding feasts, from the touching tale of the marriage of two white rhinos to the gruesome stories of the final resting places of Oliver Cromwell’s head and Gallileo’s fingers, Hatches, Matches and Dispatches reveals the true facts of life!

This moving and timely book explores the way the First World War has been thought about and commemorated, and how it has affected its own, and later, generations.On 11 November 1920, huge crowds lined the streets of London for the funeral of the Unknown Warrior. As the coffin was drawn on a gun carriage from the Cenotaph to Westminster Abbey, the King and Ministers of State followed silently behind. The modern world had tilted on its axis, but it had been saved. Armistice Day was born, the acknowledgement of the great sacrifice made by a whole generation of British men and women.Now, almost a century later, Harry Patch, the last British veteran who saw active service, has died. Our final link with the First World War is broken.Harry Patch was born in 1898 and was conscripted in 1916. He served with a Lewis gun team at the Battle of Passchendaele and in September 1917 was wounded by a shell that killed three of his comrades. After the war, Patch returned to Somerset to work as a plumber, a job he continued to do until his retirement.The First World War was fought not by a professional army but by ordinary civilians like Patch, who epitomised Edwardian Britain and the sense, now lost, of what Britain stood for and why it was worth fighting for. The Last Veteran tells Patch's story, and explores the meaning of the war to those who fought in it and the generations that have followed. Peter Parker's illuminating and timely book is a moving tribute to a remarkable generation.