Karl lives in North Staffordshire. He has written for newspapers and magazines and worked in advertising, marketing and PR, for a while crafting prose to sell stool sample jars, plus some other stuff that was even more interesting.
He mostly writes humour and popular history, including Royal Babylon, 5 People Who Died During Sex, Curing Hiccups with Small Fires: A Miscellany of Great British Eccentrics and 10 Ways to Recycle a Corpse. His most recent books are The First Showman, a history of the creator of the modern Circus, Philip Astley; Abject Quizzery, and The Killing of Lord George.