Which is the smallest country in the world?

Vatican City, at about 0.44 square kilometres and a population of a few hundred - small enough to walk around in under an hour. It has been independent only since 1929, when the Lateran Treaty settled a sixty-year standoff that began when the new Kingdom of Italy annexed the Papal States and the popes refused to leave the Vatican in protest.

It is not a country in most of the ordinary ways. Citizenship is not inherited and not permanent; it is attached to a job, and it ends when the job does. Nobody is born a Vatican citizen and stays one for life, and a large part of the workforce commutes in from Rome each morning.

The statistics it generates are consequently absurd. Per head it has the highest crime rate in the world, because the population is a few hundred and the visitors are millions, so pickpocketing tourists in St Peter's Square is divided by the wrong denominator. It also has the only cash machines in the world that offer Latin as a menu language.