On Nobel Prize winners and Mastermind losers

I once worked my way through two whole books of IQ tests devised by Hans Eysenck and by the time I had finished I was much cleverer than that self-publicising ass Einstein, according to the helpful chart, and quite possibly the cleverest person ever to have walked on the face of the earth. So I came to two conclusions. First, that — as I had long suspected — I was indeed the clever-est person ever to walk the earth and it was pleasant to have this suspicion of mine validated. And second, that one can learn to excel at IQ tests, despite the insistence from their promulgators that they are pristine and unrelated to culture or education: my score had risen by about 25 per cent by the time I threw the books away. In other words, they assess only a person’s ability to do IQ tests and are not remotely a test of raw intelligence, which in any case comes in many forms.