The History Puzzle is a wordless picture book, a classy comic with a difference. Packed into its delicately coloured, busy pages are over 1, 000 identifiable individuals, some fictional, some still living, but most of them real and from the past. Identify them all and you can claim a Pounds 10, 000 prize. Whatever happens you will be fascinated or frustrated by the attempt.

The faces are not particularly well drawn (they are very small) and they clearly posed the artist a difficult problem. We simply do not know what most historical figures looked like. If one divorces King Canute and King Alfred from sand and cakes, who can tell them apart?

So, Cherry Denman had to work with traditional images, a multitude of contextual clues and a proliferation of props.

With a supply of chocolates to hand for comfort, I settled down to play the game. I first spotted William (guess how I could Tell) and King Rufus with a red beard and an arrow up his nose. The grotesque bouffant and black handbag was clearly Margaret Thatcher, and I checked off Macmillan with his moustache (like that) and Charles I with his moustache (like this). Around 1050 (dates punctuate the bottom margins of every page), there was a lot stabbing and bludgeoning, which gory vision was only alleviated by the cherubic appearance of Godiva’s naked bottom on a horse with matching buttocks.

With only about 995 characters to go, I thought I was doing quite well and I began to revel in my ability to identify Prince Charles by his ears and Francis Drake by his bowls. But I lost concentration when I became aware of the large number of hirsute males which seemed to pop up almost everywhere. I was forced to the inevit-able and disturbing conclusion that our past is littered with the clones of Noel Edmonds. At which point, I switched from book to chocolates in despair.