Children’s books
Unhappy days
Scriptwriters love to feast on the lives of children’s authors. The themes tend not to vary: they may have brought…
Recent children’s books
Martin Stewart’s Riverkeep (Penguin, £7.99) has a list of books and writers on the cover: Moby-Dick, The Wizard of Oz,…
A breath of fresh air
His professional achievements aside, Quentin Blake’s life has been rather short on biographical event, so this book is not a…
The winged rabbit who made me a Tory
His father’s dental cast, writes Graham Greene near the beginning of The Power and the Glory ‘had been [Trench’s] favourite…
The art of Beatrix Potter
Her best illustrations — limpid, ethereal, carefully observed — are masterly works of art in their own right, argues Matthew Dennison
Meeting the monster
Michael Gove inspires irrational hatred among my fellow children’s authors. After interviewing him, I can finally see why
Diary
As any author will tell you, literary festivals differ widely. If you are invited to Willy Dalrymple’s Jaipur Festival, with…
A choice of children’s books
Animal stories for children are always tricky; as J.R.R. Tolkien observed in his essay on fairy stories, you can end…
