1 Yes, all right, if you want to be picky that is just 12 little words of warning. Just get on with reading the book.

2 This can be very serious if your garden shed catches it.

3 Please note – these pictures have never been published before and are priceless. All rights reserved. That means they must not be copied unless you send the author a million pounds (though he might settle for £5 and a bag of jelly babies if you ask him nicely).

4 All right, it isn’t a famous Turkish saying. In fact no one is daft enough to say such a bad joke … you won’t even see it in a Horrible Histories book.

5 A survey from 2011 showed that 67.8% of Horrible Histories readers enjoy rat pie and chips. Only 21.4% like mouse eyeballs on toast.

6 Some people say Ludwig lost his throne because of a revolt. That is probably true, but it’s not so much fun, so it’s the Lola Montez story that people remember.

7 The bones in the chopped-off hand weren’t broken, so at least the Prime Minister didn’t suffer that. Wasn’t he lucky?

8 The Greek gods were kinder and did gentle things like eat their own babies. The Norse gods were just as tender and might tie an enemy to a tree using his own guts for rope. Harmless really.

9 Of course the song meant the ‘bombs’ were people willing to die for him. They wouldn’t actually explode in a battle because that would be too messy.

10 What do you mean, ‘Where is Mongolia?’ This is not a geography book. Go and look it up in an Atlas, you idle reader.

11 Unscramble the letters of ‘Torturer Len’ to see what I mean. I’m not doing it for you. It took me three days to scramble them in the first place.

12 It may have been as many as 1,300,000 unarmed men, women and children that were massacred in Merv. Of course Genghis didn’t kill them himself. Each Mongol soldier killed about three or four hundred helpless people that day.

13 It is usually the Turkey that is stuffed and paraded on the Christmas dinner table. If you paraded a man in front of theTurkeys then imagine how they would cheer.

14 The men were trained in Britain and given British guns – ones that didn’t work. Somehow Britain won the war. How?