When his teacher sets the class a History project, Sam cannot choose which bit of History he prefers, so decides to do ALL OF IT.
His version of History is a rumbustious collection of half-remembered facts, assembled roughly in the right order, and glued together with alarmingly confident misunderstanding.
And yet our endearing narrator somehow inadvertently hits the nail on the head every time as when he sagely observes that the Suffragettes’ hunger strikes paid off ‘in the name of Female Emaciation’, or that before Shakespeare came along ‘everyone had been a bit rubbish at poetry’ (notwithstanding ‘Jeffrey Chortler, saviour of the Middle Agers’).
Sam takes us from Ancient Egypt right up to Last Week with the flair of a bright-eyed nine-year-old. Rumour has it he is now working on an even more ambitious tome, The Entire World and Everything In It.