Brief History of Puzzles

William Hartston is a Cambridge-educated mathematician, an international chess master and the author of The Things That Nobody Knows and Even More Things That Nobody Knows. He now writes the off-beat Beachcomber column for the Daily Express and is a viewer on Channel 4's Gogglebox.

• 0: Primeval Puzzle Prelude 1: Medieval Maths, Mysteries and Merriment 2: Parisian Perplexities, Problems and Posers 3: The Great Victorian Puzzlers 4: Puzzles Worthy of the Name 5: More Word Puzzles 6: The Logic of Hats 7: The Most Baffling Logic of All 8: Weights, Measures, Speed 9: Psychological Puzzles 10: Miscellaneous and Mysterious 11: The Prize Puzzle 12: Solutions

If you love quizzes, A Brief History of Puzzles by William Hartston will let you know whom to thank. Competently charting the development of riddles, crosswords and logic problems, from the Sphinx to sudoku, it offers examples to illustrate each great leap forward in the history of brain-teasing.