History's Greatest Drinking Games

As long as there have been people, there has been drinking, and as long as there has been drinking, there has been drinking stupidly. And across centuries and continents we can find a wobbling trail of elaborate and not-so-elaborate drinking games designed to entertain, punish, impress, and annihilate. In The Handbook of Historical Drinking Games, Elliot Martyn takes us on a guided tour of some of our forebearers' fascinating bad choices, how they came about, and how we might ill-advisedly get close to recreating them. From the Ancient Greeks competitively flinging their wine across the room in 600 BCE (Kottabos) to modern Australians pegging bags of wine to spinning clotheslines (Goon of Fortune), it's reassuring to know that we've always been idiots - and to learn some new mistakes from the fools who've come before us.

Elliot Martyn graduated from the University of Oxford with a first-class degree in modern history and also holds a master's degree from the University of London. He now works as a policy advisor and his research has been published by think tanks and international journals.