In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle goes down the rabbit-hole in this enthralling history of children’s books of all kinds Around £2.2 billion is spent on books in the UK each year, and about one-fifth of this is spent on children’s books. The publishing industry […]
The best children’s books – selected by Dr Oliver Tearle What are the top ten greatest children’s novels ever written? This is going to prove a contentious list, but below we’ve compiled what we think are ten of the best works of children’s fiction in all of English literature. We’ve […]
The best nineteenth-century British and Irish fairy stories – selected by Dr Oliver Tearle Say ‘fairy tales’ to most people and several names will usually spring to mind: Charles Perrault (who gave us Cinderella, among others, in his Tales of Mother Goose), the Brothers Grimm (Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin – though the […]
A short introduction to the children’s classic, Charlotte’s Web, in the form of five interesting facts 1. Charlotte’s Web was a huge bestseller. It was the last children’s book to appear on the New York Times bestseller list until the Harry Potter series nearly half a century later. It has gone on to sell […]
An interesting history of the popular children’s books, Just William In 1922, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was published, James Joyce celebrated the publication of his novel Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s third novel Jacob’s Room appeared. But amongst all this highbrow modernist literature, there was also another literary phenomenon arriving on the scene. […]