No more Histories? That's Horrible! However, he does expect the existing books to live on. They have, after all, inspired stage shows and a hugely popular television series. It's not the end, in the sense that the books will go on for quite a few years yet. A bit like that Charles Dickens chap. He hasn't written any new ones for years. Lazy. Idle. Or maybe he has made enough money to retire, I don't know. Speaking at home on his farm in County Durham, the 67-year-old author and actor said he would continue to write, having produced 243 titles and sold 25 million copies over the course of his career. He is now concentrating on four books for grown-ups. It is more or less Horrible Histories for adults, but I can't call it that so my series is called Dangerous Days. The first one is Dangerous Days in the Roman Empire. This will be followed by books on Elizabethan England, the Vikings and Victorian railways. If they are a great success, I can go on and on. His book on the Romans is to be published by Orion in October. They'll be entertainments first. They are not history books which have to be 100 per cent accurate. I can report things that people have said and which aren't necessarily true, as long as I put in footnotes that say, 'You don't have to believe them."" The Horrible Histories books have opened the minds of millions of children with their black humour, fascinating facts and gleeful accounts of the vile, the vicious, the gory and the daft. They are billed as "history with the nasty bits left in" and have been very helpful to teachers, although Deary hates schools and refuses to give talks in them. I'm not a history teacher. I don't write school books. I have no interest in what teachers do," he said. Teachers are just the mouthpieces for those Eton boys down in Whitehall telling them, 'You will teach this, this and this. I don't care. let them wreck the lives of the children. I can't stand up to them. All I can do is come up with an alternative which will show my young readers that history isn't actually boring and that when you talk about real people in the past - not statistics and dates and battles and kings and queens - it is the most fascinating subject in the world. The problem with the way it is taught, he said, is that teachers have to follow strict rules laid down by the Government. You're supposed to do what the numpties from Eton tell you to do. You're supposed to bash in dates, because dates are testable. No, that's not fair. They give you a sequence and a chronology, so I'm not afraid to use dates. But it's the obsession with dates, and the obsession with the big people ... the Churchills and the Nelsons of this world, rather than the little people. He might not go to schools but Deary said he would continue to make personal appearances in support of Horrible Histories, even if he is uncomfortable with some of the acclaim. It's lovely to have people reading your books, but I'm a northern male, for God's sake. I'm used to abuse.