365 Reasons to Look on the Bright Side is full to the brim with good fortune arisen out of the flames of history's biggest and smallest errors, blunders and miscalculations - one for every day of the year, on the day it happened. This brilliantly quirky book demonstrates that while the old adage of 'Everyone makes mistakes' may be true, some gaffes are so monumental that they can end up improving life for everyone else (if not for themselves!).

365 Reasons to Look on the Bright Side has many magical moments of looking on the bright side of history's most hopeless moments. Here a few to whet your whistle: Thanking Atilla the Hun for creating Venice, crediting Alexander Graham Bell's mum's deafness for inventing the telephone, praising Pope Clement VIII for blessing coffee, realizing that without the bubonic plague Newton may never had invented calculus and believing how one particularly big-boobed woman helped invent the stethoscope.

Word count: 35,000

Richard Happer is the author of many books including 365 Reasons to be Cheerful, 365 Reasons to be Proud to be British and 365 Reasons to be Proud to be Scottish. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife and son.