The temptations of Christopher Hitchens
Why the crusading journalist failed to assume the mantle of George Orwell.
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Sarah Hall: In our age of environmental catastrophes, Z for Zachariah rings horribly true
Robert C O’Brien’s story was unlike anything I’d encountered before, perhaps because it didn’t really seem like a children’s book.
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Erica Wagner: The ghost stories that haunted my childhood
A book – a hardback, bound in clear plastic – which I read, and then read again, feeling that fluttering…
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Isabel Waidner: This random children’s book might have brought about my own non-traditional writing
The Sams series is built around a German linguistic constraint: to take the name of each weekday literally and see…
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William Boyd: The Jungle Book is the first book I remember reading. And rereading
Kipling‘s stories had an intense allure for me: I too was a boy living, if not in an Indian jungle,…
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Marina Warner: Guerber’s The Myths of Greece and Rome filled my head with wild and wonderful images
The illustrations were almost more indelibly imprinted than the retellings: the frontispiece enthralled me from the moment I opened the…
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Douglas Kennedy: The Phantom Tollbooth showed me the value of imagination
Norman Juster’s seminal tale is an adventure story about the absolute wonder of learning – and the need to discover…
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Ben Okri: Long before I encountered them as plays, Shakespeare’s narratives were part of my imagination
Charles and Mary Lamb did something amazing when they retold Shakespeare’s plays for children: they made available to kids like…
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