When Jennings is inspired to take up a career as a detective, with faithful Darbishire as his assistant, trouble is bound to be just around the corner. Their first mission - to recover a 'stolen' sports cup, is the first bungled attempt to imitate super sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Frightful bish! Crystallised cheesecakes!

Set in an English preparatory school, recounts the comical adventures of Jennings.

Jennings turns journalist when he receives a printing kit for his birthday, and dubs himself editor of the Form Three Times.

A complete collection of well-loved Jennings tales, this volume begins with Jennings Goes to School--the one that started it all when JCT Jennings was sent to Linbury Court School as a boarder and met CEJ Darbishire, who quickly became his best friend. In his first term Jennings also had to face up to some frightful bullies, turning the tables on the scoundrels and becoming head of his class in the bargain. In Jennings Follows a Clue, he tries his hand as an amateur sleuth and we get to know all of the characters a little better, including Jennings' classmates Venables, Atkinson, Temple, and Bromwich major. Jennings establishes his own super-top-secret den in Jennings' Little Hut and leads Darbishire even further astray with his newt-brained, shrimp-witted schemes in Jennings and Darbishire. Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings stories have been delighting readers young and old for almost sixty years with the disastrous scrapes into which the irrepressible schoolboy blunders and the delightful language adopted by Jennings and his chums. Whether this is a 'class reunion' for you, or whether you are a 'new boy' meeting Jennings for the first time, in The Best of Jennings you will find a friend for life.

Jennings decides to build huts out of reeds and branches. He and Darbishire are thrilled with them. They include a patented ventilating shaft, a special drainage canal and a pontoon suspension bridge! Things go horribly wrong when he is put in charge of Elmer, the treasured goldfish, and even worse when the Head visits. Gruesome hornswoggler!

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A witty, charming, and engaging dive into trivia’s colorful history, from America’s highest-earning game show contestant of all time “Insightful, informative, and written with a strong dose of humor and humility. . . . I loved this book.”—Will Shortz, crossword editor, The New York Times Ken Jennings is trivia’s undisputed king—and as he traces his rise from anonymous computer programmer to nerd folk icon, he explores his newly conquered kingdom: the world of trivia itself. Trivia, he has found, is centuries older than his childhood obsession with it. Whisking us from the coffeehouses of seventeenth-century London to the Internet age, Jennings chronicles the ups and downs of the trivia fad: the quiz book explosion of the Jazz Age; the rise, fall, and rise again of TV quiz shows; the nostalgic campus trivia of the 1960s; and the 1980s, when Trivial Pursuit® again made it fashionable to be a know-it-all. Jennings also investigates the shadowy demimonde of today’s trivia subculture, guiding us on a tour of trivia across America. He goes head-to-head with the blowhards and diehards of the college quiz-bowl circuit, the slightly soused faithful of the Boston pub trivia scene, and the raucous participants in the annual Q&A marathon in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, “The World’s Largest Trivia Contest.” And, of course, he takes us behind the scenes of his improbable 75-game run on Jeopardy! But above all, Brainiac is a love letter to the useless fact. (Who knew that there’s a crater on Venus named after Laura Ingalls Wilder? Ken Jennings, that’s who.) Engaging and erudite, Brainiac is an irresistible celebration of nostalgia, curiosity, and geeky obsession—in a word, trivia.

Draws on medical case histories, scientific findings, and personal research by the author to separate myth from fact and debunk a vast array of parental edicts.

'Ah, yes! Jennings - as usual - it always is' Jennings accidentally sets his rubber on fire. 'The High Fidelity Telephonic Communication' (or two tins and a piece of string); the 'Affair of the Assistant Masterpiece' and Jennings as a musical prodigy. Old Wilkie is definitely not going to get the peace and quiet he was hoping for. 'Mouldy chizz!'

The “charming and terrifying” story of IBM’s breakthrough in artificial intelligence, from the Business Week technology writer and author of The Numerati (Publishers Weekly, starred review). For centuries, people have dreamed of creating a machine that thinks like a human. Scientists have made progress: computers can now beat chess grandmasters and help prevent terrorist attacks. Yet we still await a machine that exhibits the rich complexity of human thought—one that doesn’t just crunch numbers, or take us to a relevant web page, but understands and communicates with us. With the creation of Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing computer, we are one step closer to that goal. In Final Jeopardy, Stephen Baker traces the arc of Watson’s “life,” from its birth in the IBM labs to its big night on the podium. We meet Hollywood moguls and Jeopardy! masters, genius computer programmers and ambitious scientists, including Watson’s eccentric creator, David Ferrucci. We see how Watson’s breakthroughs and the future of artificial intelligence could transform medicine, law, marketing, and even science itself, as machines process huge amounts of data at lightning speed, answer our questions, and possibly come up with new hypotheses. As fast and fun as the game itself, Final Jeopardy shows how smart machines will fit into our world—and how they’ll disrupt it. “The place to go if you’re really interested in this version of the quest for creating Artificial Intelligence.” —The Seattle Times “Like Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, Baker’s book finds us at the dawn of a singularity. It’s an excellent case study, and does good double duty as a Philip K. Dick scenario, too.” —Kirkus Reviews “Like a cross between Born Yesterday and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Baker’s narrative is both . . . an entertaining romp through the field of artificial intelligence—and a sobering glimpse of things to come.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

The boys at Linbury Court Prep are eager to speed up space travel. Jennings' task is to find a suitable helmet. But is it really a good idea to take a dome-shaped glass-case, which housed a stuffed woodpecker? Petrified paintpots! Jennings and Darbishire's luck is in when they attempt to apprehend a suspected burglar? Bat-witted clodpoll!