I knew what these were when I bought them (I bought three) – written for a much younger audience – but given the woefully little I know about world history, I figured anything was better than nothing and as I tend to think straight history texts rather dull, ultimately, I probably wasn't that far outside its target audience after all, in terms of attention span.

I started with this one as it was the thinnest, and thankfully, I knew most of it already - I'm not that ignorant after all! - but there were a lot of details I didn't know. The obliteration of everything that indicated a location, for example. Business signs that indicated the town/village/city name had that name painted over; public transit station names were removed. I also didn't know there was such a time gap between the first blitz and the second. And I will always know that in a stream of terrible years, 1942 was by far the worst for the homefront in terms of legislated deprivation.

Some of the stories were funny, of course. The one about the girl who, listening to her mum about strange men approaching her during the blackout, accidentally put her own father head first into a pig scrap bin had both MT and I giggling. ( )

A fairly amusing book, but not as amusing as Deary's other works that I have read. I suspect this is because recent history contains fewer bloodthirsty oddities. ( )