Companion piece to Dodger, but unfortunately falls a bit short of that book's charm. It's hard to know who the intended audience is, really - like a cheap children's encyclopaedia it skips from snippet to snippet of vaguely related information without spending enough time on any topic long enough to be really interesting, but a lot of the jokes would go straight over the head of most children - especially the many cartoons reproduced from Punch.

Actually, I suspect what happened is that Pratchett had done lots of interesting research while writing Dodger, not all of which actually made it into the book, so he wanted an excuse to pass on all the other cool stuff he'd found out (and there is some really cool stuff in here), and this mish-mash was the result. Either that, or it's a failed attempt at the Horrible Histories genre.

A pity, because it could have been really good.

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