“Oh woe! Oh woe!” I know, I know, everything can sound downright adorable when voiced by a toddler – or by your own toddler, at any rate – but there’s something exceptionally so about the refrain of Mac Burnett and Jon Klassen’s new book, The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse. And it’s a cracker […]

When my daughter was around six months old, I’d peer out of her nursery window and see a neighbour reclining in a hammock with her newborn. The infant was always asleep, the mother forever reading. No frantic nocturnal skimming of mummy blogs for her (do yourself a favour: never ask the internet when your baby […]

Owl Babies. Can there be anything cuter? Only if we’re talking owl babies written into being by Martin Waddell and illustrated by Patrick Benson. This new edition marks the book’s 25th anniversary and it arrives fittingly garlanded in gold foil. The story is simple and warmly told: owlets Sarah, Percy and Bill awake one night […]

Rudyard Kipping was smitten with Bateman’s from the moment he clapped eyes on the place. In a letter from 1902, the year he and his family moved into the Jacobean manor, he describes ‘a grey stone lichened house […] beamed, panelled, with old oak staircase, and all untouched and unfaked. It is a good and […]

Happy birthday Shirley Hughes! My memories of her from my own childhood may be dim but 40 years after it was first published – and as she celebrates her own 90th birthday – her bestselling story about a favourite toy lost and found is a firm favourite in my household. Dogger tells the story of […]

Back when my little girl was just a month or so old, a screenwriter friend called to ask if I’d lately come across any novels that might make for a good film adaptation. The only book that popped into my sleep-starved, love-drunk mind was The Very Hungry Caterpillar. “It has a great beginning, middle and […]

Remembering a book from childhood. It’s a madeleine moment everyone can relate to, and it’s #47 of Daniel Gray’s ’50 eternal delights of books’, sandwiched between ‘Letting Poetry Tingle Your Spine’ and ‘Getting Waylaid Looking at a Dictionary’ (I’m with him there – how else would I have discovered the word galactophagist*?). As Gray explains […]