'Jays are not nearly so nice as they look' - that's how people used to write nature books. Ornithology-enthusiast Nige makes a Proustian discovery in a charity shop... There it was, in the window of the local hospice shop: British Birds and Their Nests - by Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, with colour illustrations by Allen W. ... Read More...
Children’s Books
Tens of millions of Britons learnt to read with the Peter and Jane books. In her second piece for The Dabbler, Ladybird expert Helen Day examines how the books - and their revisions - reflected British middle-class life, or an ideal of it... Do the words 'Peter and Jane' take you back ... Read More...
Helen Day is the curator of surely the most authorative website about Ladybird Books on the net. Her knowledge of and enthusiasm for the children's educational classics has seen her feature in newspaper articles, radio shows and TV documentaries. In the first of a series of posts for The Dabbler, ... Read More...
They simply wrote a lot of popular children's books about a family of bears. So how did the Berenstain's manage to enrage two quite different sets of modern moralists?... Usually the death of a prominent person is greeted with respectful appraisal. After a while it fades, but initially “don’t speak ill ... Read More...