Bryson is great when explaining the idiosyncrasies of America to middle England and making it funny - after all, few countries so consistently offer madness beyond the nightmares of parodists and satirists.
But the truth of the matter is that no information explaining the idiosyncrasies of children will ever prepare you for the humiliation you will suffer when you appear with your own brood in public.
That familiarity helps explain the shrewd authenticity of the scenes between Ana and the play's two other nanny characters, as they mock their employers, dissect their idiosyncrasies and defy food restrictions they find foolish.
Few explained the club's idiosyncrasies better, few internalised them better.
An 1884 New York Times article explained: "the latest fashionable idiosyncrasy in London" was "the visiting of the slums… by parties of ladies and gentlemen for sightseeing".
I am indebted to Michèle Belot, Lex Borghans, Joni Hersch and Michael Price, each of whom provided one of the data sets used here and explained its idiosyncrasies, and to the CentER of Tilburg University for making the DNB data available.
Imre Kertész, a Hungarian novelist and Holocaust survivor, won the Nobel Prize for literature, and two Americans, Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University and Vernon L. Smith at George Mason University, won the economic prize for explaining idiosyncrasies in the way people made decisions.
C1 Nobel Prize in Economics Daniel Kahneman and Vernon L. Smith won the Nobel prize in economics for trying to explain idiosyncrasies in people's ways of making decisions and introducing psychology into the economics discipline.
Two Americans have won this year's Nobel award in economics for trying to explain idiosyncrasies in people's ways of making decisions, research that has helped incorporate insights from psychology into the discipline of economics.
As he follows the twists and turns of Slavic history from the principalities of Kievan Rus in the late ninth century to the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, he holds back from putting forward a single, all-purpose theory of culture or geography to explain Russia's idiosyncrasies.
