Mikey Robins' Idiots, Follies & Misadventures details historic moments of spectacular stupidity

It was a tough choice: he had topped his year in history at Newcastle High School but, thinking he would probably end up being an English teacher, majored in drama.

Instead, his career took him into comedy and broadcasting - "I haven't had a real job since 1989" - but the 61-year-old never lost his passion for the past.

"I'm a bit of a bowerbird," Robins says.

"I'll go wherever stuff takes me. Because I didn't study history, for me it's about story first."

And he's found enough stories to fill three books so far.

Seven Deadly Sins and One Very Naughty Fruit (2019) was about food, and the title of Reprehensible: Polite Histories of Bad Behaviour (2020) speaks for itself.

The new book is Idiots, Follies & Misadventures, the title of which is also pretty self-explanatory.

Robins opens with the quote from Albert Einstein: "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe."

He then goes on to take the reader on a rollicking ride through some of the high - or should that be low? - points of stupidity in Western history, from ancient Greece and Rome to the 20^th century, from medical mishaps to military maladroitness.

The main reason for focusing on the West, Robins says, was that a lot of his writing was "taking the piss" and he felt comfortable doing that to his own culture but not the cultures of other civilisations.

The idea for the new book arose when he was researching his first.

"I kept coming across stories that were just dumb."

One of his favourite examples of stupidity is Heinrich Albert, a German spy in the US during World War I, who left a briefcase full of incriminating documents on a streetcar, then placed a classified ad offering $20 for its return. Too late - it was already in the hands of the American authorities, who had been on to Albert for some time.

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Mindful of Franklin P. Adams' line that "Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory", Robins points out that stupidity has always been with us.

History focuses a lot on villains and heroes, dates and battles, Robins says, but there's not a lot about the idiots. Sometimes they only hurt themselves but sometimes their blunders can have a big impact.

John Frederick Parker is one example of the latter, failing spectacularly on April 14, 1865.

"Parker was Abraham Lincoln's bodyguard," Robins says. He was on duty at Ford's Theatre when Lincoln and his wife were watching Our American Cousin, a few days after the US Civil War had ended with the defeat of the Confederacy.

"He left his post to get a better view of the play and then he left the theatre because he didn't like the play," Robins says.

Parker went for a drink at the saloon next door.

He might have passed actor and Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth, who had stopped by for some liquid courage before going into the theatre and assassinating the unguarded Lincoln.

"It was a great moment in bungling idiocy," Robins says.

Then there's another American, Thomas Midgley Jr, whose deleterious impact was even more far reaching.

A mechanical engineer for General Motors, he introduced lead-based engine fuel (despite lead's known harmful properties) and, less immediately harmful or obvious, chlorofluorocarbon (CFC). Commercially known as Freon, this gas was used in refrigeration and has caused immense damage to Earth's ozone layer.

Midgley's final invention killed him. Debilitated by polio, he devise an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to help him out of bed.

On the morning of November 2, 1944, he was discovered entangled in and asphyxiated by the apparatus.

Robins says the book was a lockdown project and was researched mostly on the internet, which he calls "a double-edged sword": there's a lot of information there but it isn't always reliable.

He spent a lot of time double-checking facts, relying when possible on reputable sources like peer-reviewed journals and newspapers of record like The New York Times.

Having wallowed in stupidity for some time, Robins is not sure what his next writing project will be -he's tossing around a few possibilities - but is planning a holiday first.

"I'll go and see my sister and lie on the beach for a while."

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