Ayatollah Khomeini once wrote a poem containing the unlikely line, 'Let the doors of the tavern be opened and let us go there day and night.'

The fact in the headline is from this piece in the Literary Review, from which we also learn that:

- Yazidis refuse to eat lettuce or wear blue

- the Druze and the Yazidis are at one on the importance of moustaches, and

- Mandaeans are keen astrologers who believe that children who die unbaptised are comforted for eternity by trees bearing breast-shaped fruit.