Ionia

Paul Andruss and his partner moved to Turkey three years ago after deciding to stop moaning about life and start living it.  Each year they take a trip: this year it was to some of the ancient sites a few hours drive away. This land of gods and heroes fills me with irrational love and irrepressible longing. Here a sister married her brother and built him a tomb so magnificent it became ...

Pull Out All The Stops

Sarah McIntyre and Philip Reeve have been intrigued, entertained and amazed by Geraldine McCaughrean's Pull Out All The Stops, a brand-new sequel to her much-loved novel Stop The Train.   Here are some photographs to prove it: Intrigued... Entertained... Amazed! Stop The Train told how the children of the prairie town of Olive, Oklahoma, manage to persuade the railway company ...

Fresh Pages: Samples from the Sound-World of The Books.

By Nick Riddle. The Books (Photo: Nino P.) Radio 3’s Late Junction is pretty good at digging up a few curious and engaging pieces from the loamy subsoil of music’s less-frequented corners. Thanks to Fiona Talkington and co, I am no longer a knee-jerk knitter of the eyebrows at the mere mention of electronica or sampling. I discovered I’m quite partial to Matthew Herbert, especially his  Plat ...

St Vincent

Philip Reeve turns his attention to that modern-type beat music. Now I don't set myself up as a music critic.  I know almost nothing about music, and for long periods of my life I've been happy to listen to none at all.  Nowadays I have an MP3 player, but it only comes out when I'm on a long train journey, and is mostly filled with stuff I liked when I was fifteen - listening to ...

You're in the Country now...

Text and photos by Andrew Gorton. One rather damp morning, I decided to cycle to the ruins of a local castle (or 'fortified manor' as the English Heritage sign has it), at Baconsthorpe. I took a path along a recently ploughed field towards some woods, and soon found my way blocked by a style. Being too lazy to lift the bike over I retraced my route 50 yards and took a left turn, hoping to find ...

War Without Hate

Philip Reeve celebrates a classic film, and the book on which it was based. I was born more than twenty years after the end of the Second World War, but as a child I could almost have been forgiven for thinking that it was still going on.  We boys of the 1970's played Tommies vs Huns in the school playground, spent our evenings sticking together model Spitfires and Hurricanes, and ...

Mr Levett's Scottish Tour: Part the Last.

In which Jeremy Levett and family reach Edinburgh, the final stop on their Caledonian oddyssey. Photo: Oliver Bonjoch I'd forgotten Edinburgh. It's one of the loveliest cities I know. Colin and Paula are old friends of my parents, and their children only a bit older than my brothers and I. Their house, near Newhaven, is linked to Dorothy and Paul’s house on Corstorphine Road by a pleasantly long ...

A Conversation with Ian Beck

I think it's fair to say that Ian Beck is something of a legend in the world of children's books; part of that great generation of illustrators who emerged from Britain's art colleges in the 1960s.  He has long been famed for his picture books, but in recent years he's turned to writing longer stories too: his beautifully illustrated Tom Trueheart series harks back to the era of Arthur Rackham ...