In the author’s note at the beginning of Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullshit (reproduced below) I committed to keeping a public, regularly updated list of corrections and clarifications for the book. This is that! This is something I also meant to do with my first book, Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up, but I, uh… forgot to actually mention that I was going to do that in the text, after which it seemed a little bit superfluous.
Luckily, I mention in Truth that we did discover a few (fortunately relatively non-catastrophic) errors in Humans, particularly when putting together the American edition. So now seems like a good time to acknowledge them too! As such, I’m going to divide this page in two:
🙁 The corrections and updates for Humans live here
☹️ And the corrections and updates for Truth live here
As I say in the author’s note, if you’ve read either and have found a factual error, large or small, please email me at truth@tom-phillips.com. (Do try and keep it to factual errors, though. This isn’t the Have An Argument hotline, I mean what do you think Twitter’s for.)
Truth: Author’s Note
This is a book about things that aren’t true. For fairly obvious reasons, this has meant that I’ve spent the past year in a state of almost permanent anxiety.
The book deals with history, and history is messy enough at the best of times, filled with provisional truths and half-truths and outright myths. In my previous book, which was about failure, I wrote that “the chance of this book about fuck-ups not including any fuck-ups in it is, frankly, minimal”. (And yep: we have since found a few, thankfully none of them especially awful.) If writing about the topic of failure seemed like tempting the Gods of Fate, then choosing falsehood as the follow up topic is basically presenting the gods with an open goal. And let’s be honest, the Gods of Fate are unlikely to miss a tap-in to an empty net from two yards out. Not with the kind of form they’re in right now.
So yes, there will undoubtedly be some mistakes somewhere in this book. I’ve done my best to avoid them: double and triple checking, going back to original documents wherever possible, trying to avoid the traps of over-interpretation. The footnotes should help you to check the facts yourself (and I’d encourage you to do so). But still, something will have crept through. Errors are inevitable; all we can do is try to minimise them, admit them, and mitigate them. That’s one of the main points of the book! To that end, if you do spot a factual error – no matter how small – please email me at truth@tom-phillips.com. I’ll be keeping a running public list of corrections at tom-phillips.com/mistakes-and-regrets/
Note: why yes, this page is named after a song by …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead.