What is the shade of difference between Sod's Law and Murphy's Law? What is the Helsinki Bus Station Theory? What part do the McNaughton Rules and the Miranda Law play in criminal justice?

Plenty of books claim to tell you how to succeed in life, love or business with infallible sets of guidelines and self-help principles, but have nothing to say about the laws - often hidden ones - which really govern our lives. Skyscrapers, Hemlines and the Eddie Murphy Rule is an anthology of the many quirky, useful or entertaining rules and principles, which, if they are well known, crop up without explanation or, if confined to specialist circles, deserve to be more widely understood and appreciated.

Here is a deliberately diverse scrapbook of the attempts to provide a system and an explanation, whether serious or humorous, eccentric or plain mischievous, for human activity across politics, science, sport, economics, the Internet, work, and life itself.