I suppose we might say that the Iron Man is Ted Hughes himself, the strong man who fell off a cliff and broke into pieces, but then painstakingly found the pieces and bolted them back together. Eating tractors and cars and barbed wire, he sought to eat up the modern world and let something more…
‘Just on the other side of the wall’. Ah, how often did the young Frances Hodgson Burnett wonder what lay there, when by the sudden death of her father she was plunged from middle-class comfort into years of precariousness like her heroine Sara, the princess of this story (and surely so like the young and indeed…
A factual book, though of course the translation of caterpillar into butterfly, as ugly duckling into swan, has a spiritual resonance for us all. I like that Vivian French finds a middle ground. She delivers facts (I have learned things I didn’t know before), but also remembers her grandfather and her own childhood excitement and…
