Children’s books
The Lion’s Mane, the Firework and terrible jellyfish jokes: the year’s best children’s books
Contemporary authors, including Rick Riordan, Kate di Camillo, Mark Forsyth and Michael Stavaric, share shelf space with welcome reprints, including the ever-terrifying Struwwelpeter
Why does the Beano want to cancel itself?
The drive for inclusivity in children’s publishing
Don’t cancel Beatrix Potter
Don’t cancel Beatrix Potter
I know how AI will bring us down
On the smooth marble concourse by the exit doors at Heathrow Airport I met my first cleaning robot. It was…
Were old children’s history books racist?
Are children’s history books racist?
Radio 4's Moominland Midwinter restores Moomintroll's innocence
Moomins do not like winter. In one of Tove Jansson’s stories, Moomin’s Winter Follies, young Moomintroll bumps his head when…
Children’s books for all ages: the best of 2021
She’s done it again: J.K. Rowling has written a captivating children’s book. The Christmas Pig(Little Brown, £20) is about a…
If you didn’t love Jansson already, you will now: Tove reviewed
Tove is a biopic of the Finnish artist Tove Jansson who, most famously, created the Moomins, that gentle family of…
Animal magic: children’s books for Christmas
J.K. Rowling has written a book for children — and you know what? It’s a charmer. The Ickabod(Hachette, £20) was…
The gentle genius of Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Peake’s unsettling illustrations reveal a gentle, kindly man with the soul of a pirate, says Daisy Dunn
Children’s books provide the perfect escape from coronovirus
The lockdown we have been enduring has at times felt drawn from the pages of a children’s book. The eerie…
Perfectly serviceable – at points even charming: Four Kids and It reviewed
This film contains flying children, time travel and a sand monster that lives under a beach — yet the most…
Angels and daemons: Children’s books for Christmas
Sometimes I have to admit the reason I read children’s books with pleasure is that I’m essentially puerile —and look,…
Letters: How to squash a Speaker
No special protection Sir: Rod Liddle’s joke that the election might be held on a date when Muslims cannot vote,…
Children’s literature has become horribly right-on
There was a spat the other week about a children’s book, Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court,…
Edith Nesbit — a children’s writer of genius who disinherited her own adopted offspring
‘When one writes for children,’ the novelist Jill Paton Walsh has said, ‘there are more people in the room. Writing…
A child’s-eye view of the world: The Curse of the School Rabbit, by Judith Kerr, reviewed
Is there a more perfect children’s writer for this generation than Judith Kerr? She started with a tiger — The…
Family favourites: children’s books for Christmas reviewed
There’s no shortage of magical rings in the children’s canon, the sort of things that usefully make you invisible or…
Lucy Mangan has enough comic energy to power the National Grid
After three hot-water-bottle-warmed evenings of highly satisfying bedtime reading, I can confirm that, even in a world where Francis Spufford’s…
A chance to see the Moomins’ creator for the genius she really was: Tove Janssons reviewed
Tove Jansson, according to her niece’s husband, was a squirt in size and could rarely be persuaded to eat, preferring…
The tyranny of the bedtime story
All surveys carried out by retail businesses with a view to generating press coverage should be treated with extreme caution,…
Unhappy days
Scriptwriters love to feast on the lives of children’s authors. The themes tend not to vary: they may have brought…
Sinister summer reading for children
Martin Stewart’s Riverkeep (Penguin, £7.99) has a list of books and writers on the cover: Moby-Dick, The Wizard of Oz,…
Quentin Blake brings comfort and joy
His professional achievements aside, Quentin Blake’s life has been rather short on biographical event, so this book is not a…
I became a Conservative thanks to a little winged rabbit called Pookie
His father’s dental cast, writes Graham Greene near the beginning of The Power and the Glory ‘had been [Trench’s] favourite…
