A book about children’s books is, of course, one for the grown-ups, but it is a subject that holds us long after we’ve joined the readers-aloud rather than the read-to classes. CS Lewis, who was perceptive about the allure of children’s books (he would be, wouldn’t he), observed that he read children’s books with pleasure as an adult in the same way that as an adult he still enjoyed lemon squash; the difference was that he now also enjoyed port. The point is, grown-up literary pleasures do not cancel out childish ones (at least, not the good sort); they just add to them.
Sam Leith is the best kind of guide to this world in which we once wandered. He is fair-minded but terrifically opinionated; good on secondary sources without getting bogged down; excellent at analysing the technical merits of a story but not too grown-up to forget how he once listened to them – his book begins with his own father reading to him from Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories “…O Best Beloved”. And he quotes with approval Edith Nesbit (if you haven’t read Five Children and It, what are you waiting for) – who said that she could remember exactly what it was to be a child; in fact that the only way to understand a child was through memory.
