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Ten Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince facts
What to expect in the new Harry Potter movie

The movie starts with some serious fisticuffs, involving the demolition of a major London landmark. What's more, the Death Eaters, the cowled servants of evil wizard Lord Voldemort, have a much bigger role to play on screen, leading to some epic battles between them and the heroic Hogwarts wizards.

Our heroes are no longer kids. As they are growing up they are discovering 'the other sex'. Harry starts fancying Ginny, Ron's younger sister, while Ron himself is paired up with new girl Lavender Brown. Oooooh, snogging!

The movie-makers are already promising chills regards the Inferi, the undead corpses Harry must grapple with in order to gets his hands on a much-needed device. "They're horrible," actor Daniel Radcliffe told Empire magazine. "It's that terrible look of a body that's wasted away, but not a skeleton."

If you thought Prisoner Of Azkaban was a touch dark then consider this – Guillermo Del Toro, the award-winning Mexican director behind such spine-tingling movies as The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, was originally due to direct the movie. Now that would have been creepy...

Britain's favourite character actor, Jim Broadbent, makes his Potter debut. He plays former Hogwarts potion teacher Horace Slughorn, a tragic character who returns to Hogwarts to take over the jinxed job of teacher of Dark Arts.

Lucius Malfoy, the father of Harry's school arch-rival Drako , sits this movie out (well, he is in prison). Apparently actor Jason Isaacs, so upset at being left to languish in chokey, appeared on bended knee in front of author JK Rowling at an awards dinner and begged to be let back in the action. Rowling then agreed to free him in the first chapter of the final novel.

Quidditch is back. The Hogwarts school sport which pits wizard against wizard in a broomstick-flying mix of football, hockey and dog-fighting returns in a much-awaited scene, having been frustratingly absent from the Order Of The Phoenix.

Apparently, JK Rowling, on reading through the script for the new movie, came across a reference to Dumbledore, having a crush on a girl in his youth. She then told the movie-makers that was in fact gay, and that the Hogwarts head honcho's only crush was on a male wizard called Grindelwald. She made this news public at a conference for the launch of the last Potter book, The Deathly Hallows.

If you thought that you knew everything about Harry Potter then think again, producers have hinted that some new revelations about the boy wizard will be revealed in the closing minutes of Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince! Ooooh...