The phenomenon by which groups of animals all suddenly begin to copy a new behaviour – like blue-tits learning to open milk bottle tops – has been termed morphic resonance. Something very similar to the blue-tits’ discovery has recently been...
Cold, magic, adventure, family, comedy, fires in the dark – we all know what makes for a wonderful Christmas story. The bulging sack of children’s books could cause Santa’s sleigh to sink. Cressida Cowell and Neal Layton’s deliciously droll Emily...
“Yes, oh dear yes, the novel tells a story.” If I had to trace the death of the novel – or at least a prolonged attempt to kill it – to a single phrase, this is it. EM Forster wrote...
Few readers will fail to spot this has been a golden year for children’s books. With Philip Pullman’s magisterial return to the world of His Dark Materials in La Belle Sauvage, and Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s rapturously received nature-fest The Lost...
If keeping your spirits up in the past month has been difficult, then the best children’s books may be a present to yourself. I am emerging from the duvet much as Moses came down from the mountain, to say there...
Lappin's account of her life as a mulitple émigré is shot through with sadness and euphoria.