Prior to I also began remodeling my residence, I understood that my child’s space would certainly remain in a classic environment. This design stimulates the moment of care free childhood years, when there was not yet all this modernity, and also the kid had one precious teddy bear and also one train. As well as […]

Further to my post yesterday about ads at the end of old kids’ paperbacks, I don’t think I’ll be the only Chalet School afficionado who remembers this one: This comes from the back of my 1971 paperback of Shocks for the Chalet School, and I know it appeared in other Chalet books as well. But […]

Book marketing can seem really in your face these days. Sometimes just reading my Twitter and Facebook feeds is like spending half an hour in front of the telly, with ads on a continuous loop. I find the bombardment of author self-promotion really off-putting, to be honest, and have found myself completely turned off by […]

Time I posted the answers, eh? 1. X blew on his nails, shifted a little, settled back in the first cramped position. Far off in the quiet guns cracked like hail rattling on a sleeper’s window; he yawned and wondered about moving; and then, unbelievably, the surface of the plough broke into dark flying clods […]

I used to love reading comics as a kid. I liked the speech bubbles, the thought bubbles, the different way of telling a story. Some of the comic strip stories in Tammy, Bunty and Pink have a special place in my heart, right in there with the Chalet School, the Lone Piners and the Famous […]

To celebrate the Commonwealth Games, which have just kicked off in Glasgow… Here are ten quotations from old children’s books, each one featuring one of the Glasgow 2014 sports.  Can you identify the books and their authors? Any names in the quotations have been replaced with an X to make the quotations trickier to guess. […]

When I received the 1976 Diana annual in the post yesterday, the first thing I noticed was that the cover was pink. As someone who’s been frustrated by the all-pervading pink-and-sparkliness of everything aimed at girls, I did pause to wonder whether there really had been a lot of pink around when I was growing […]

Look what I found in a Diana annual from 1976 that my mom sent me: It’s a game where you have to make your way to a live Top of the Pops show, via the BBC corridors. If you land on 5, Donny has invited you into his dressing room for a cup of coffee. […]