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Was it better in the old days?

Jonathan Steele: The Rise of Nazarbayev, 28 January 2010

Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan 
by Jonathan Aitken.
Continuum, 269 pp., £20, July 2009, 978 1 4411 5381 4
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... nights gave Astana a winter wonderland feel of being the setting for a 21st-century fairy tale by Hans ChristianAndersen.’ The flattery meanwhile ranges from the banal to the cringing. Kazakhstan is by far the largest and most important of the Central Asian states, with a landmass greater than that of the other four ...

Lady Talky

Alison Light: Lydia Lopokova, 18 December 2008

Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes 
by Judith Mackrell.
Weidenfeld, 476 pp., £25, April 2008, 978 0 297 84908 7
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... Why does she want the red shoes? She wants to be special and she wants to be looked at. In Hans ChristianAndersen’s famous tale, Karen, a peasant girl, goes barefoot in summer and in winter wears wooden clogs that rub her feet raw, but the mirror tells her she’s lovely and she thinks that wearing the red shoes will make her feel like a princess ...

Good Books

Marghanita Laski, 1 October 1981

The Promise of Happiness 
by Fred Inglis.
Cambridge, 333 pp., £17.50, March 1981, 0 521 23142 6
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The Child and the Book 
by Nicholas Tucker.
Cambridge, 259 pp., £15, March 1981, 0 521 23251 1
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The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction 
by J.S. Bratton.
Croom Helm, 230 pp., £11.95, July 1981, 0 07 099777 2
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Children’s Literature. Vol. IX 
edited by Francelia Butler, Samuel Pickering, Milla Riggio and Barbara Rosen.
Yale, 241 pp., £17.35, March 1981, 0 300 02623 4
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The ‘Signal’ Approach to Children’s Books 
edited by Nancy Chambers.
Kestrel, 352 pp., £12.50, September 1980, 0 7226 5641 6
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... fictional tracts manufactured for the newly-literate poor, the aim is to awaken the child to Christian promise, especially in the light of quite probable premature death. The boys’ writers of the 19th century, from Marryat to Henty, typically sought to arouse male virtue, fearlessness, pride in nationhood and then in empire, and finally achieved, as ...

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

... another. Above all, the Alice books; then Arabian Nights, Arthurian legend, Gulliver’s Travels, Hans ChristianAndersen and Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’. The reading I found indispensable, though, was the non-fiction connected with games and dance and movies and the like: it seemed so ...

Kermode’s Changing Times

P.N. Furbank, 7 March 1991

The Uses of Error 
by Frank Kermode.
Collins, 432 pp., £18, February 1991, 9780002154659
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... manoeuvre, he argues to be one and the same problem. It is not merely commentators – rabbinic, Christian or Princeton professor-type – who ‘interpret’, it is what any storyteller does. The Evangelist, for whom what makes a story true is that it interprets and fulfils an Old Testament testimony or prophecy, is in no very different situation from a ...

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