From the tiniest nanoparticle to the vast span of the Large Hadron Collider, humans have invented many remarkable things. But not every idea is a winner - just ask 'Friday' singer Rebecca Black.

This wonderfully eclectic yet uniformly awful compendium traverses millennia of dreadful concepts, from homeopathy to hacky sacks, from Esperanto to Elmo and from athleisure to the Apple Vision Pro, demonstrating that alongside the magnificent march of human progress are many examples of failure, farce and outright fraud - many of which are far more hilarious than intended.

The Dictionary of Terrible Ideas reminds us that no matter how high we may soar, humans are as unreliable as a Bluetooth connection, as irritating as a self-checkout machine, and as prone to making poor decisions as Kanye West - all of which feature inside the turducken of terribleness that is this book.