Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

When she was a little girl, my mother was quite sure she knew how authors decided on the titles for their books. They picked whatever it wa...

In Chaucer’s time, the word for a poet or author was ‘a maker’ - as witness the Scots poet William Dunbar’s luminous ‘Lament for the Make...

  A week or so ago I was in a pub garden watching a little boy of about three trying to play Aunt Sally - a game rather like skittles which ...

--> My first of these three posts (a trilogy of posts does seem to be the right number for talking about fantasy worlds...) discusse...

Earthsea, Narnia, Middle Earth – the three classic fantasy worlds I talked about last week – are distinctive places. Most children – most p...

This will be the first of two posts about other worlds in children’s and YA fiction – about fantasy worlds; the sort of magical countries m...

I’ve always been a little impatient with fantasy worlds whose inhabitants are so feeble they are unable to sort out their own problems unt...