The journalist and author chooses his six favourite children’s books. His new book, "The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading", examining classics from Aesop to "Harry Potter", is out this week.
Peter Pan
Much, much wilder and stranger than Disney would have you believe, Barrie's original "Peter Pan" is dangerous, exciting and also, as his creator describes him, a "tragic boy". It's a complex and magical piece of work.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Available on The Week Bookshop
The Once and Future King
T.H. White, 1958
Malory's "Morte d'Arthur" pushed through White's bizarre sensibility. Radiantly well written, deeply moving, morally serious and wildly funny in the silliest ways possible, it's like nothing else.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Grinny
Nicholas Fisk, 1973
Weird sci-fi/ horror alien home-invasion fantasy. What if a Great Aunt Emma you'd never heard of turned up on the doorstep and said, "You remember me?" and your parents came over all weird and asked her to stay? It traumatised a generation.
Watership Down
Richard Adams, 1972
Adams’s bizarre but thrillingly successful book asks us to take the lives of rabbits as seriously as the lives of Homeric heroes. It’s gripping, punctiliously realistic about rabbit behaviour and biology (except for the, um, psychic one) – and the final page will break you.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Tom's Midnight Garden
Philippa Pearce, 1958
Heartbreaking time-slip novel about the friendship between a modern boy and the Victorian girl he meets when the clock strikes 13 and he finds himself wandering like a ghost through the formal garden that once stood where he’s living. "The Time Traveler’s Wife" for pre-teens.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Goodnight Moon
Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, 1947
On a skim, this postwar children’s picture book is a mimsy bedtime story about a bunny. But what’s going on with the vanishing and reappearing objects and figures? The more you examine it, the more you see. “Goodnight, nobody.”
Available on The Week Bookshop
-
The Week Unwrapped: Can musicians challenge Putin?Podcast Plus who were the ‘human hunters’ of the Bosnian war? And what should happen to captive penguins?
-
The week’s best photosIn Pictures A greedy gull, the fall of AI, and more
-
Sudoku hard: November 14, 2025The daily hard sudoku puzzle from The Week
-
5 ghost towns worth haunting on your next road tripEnjoy a glimpse of the past
-
Train Dreams pulses with ‘awards season gravitas’The Week Recommends Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton star in this meditative period piece about a working man in a vanished America
-
Middleland: Rory Stewart’s essay collection is a ‘triumph’The Week Recommends The Rest is Politics co-host compiles his fortnightly columns written during his time as an MP
-
Glinda vs. Elphaba, Jennifer Lawrence vs. postpartum depression and wilderness vs. progress in November moviesthe week recommends This month’s new releases include ‘Wicked: For Good,’ ‘Die My Love’ and ‘Train Dreams’
-
‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ and ‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’feature The culture divide in small-town Ohio and how the internet usurped dictionaries
-
10 great advent calendars for everyone (including the dog)The Week Recommends Countdown with cocktails, jams and Legos
-
Gen Z in Los Angeles, the end of ‘Stranger Things’ and a new mystery from the creator of ‘Breaking Bad’ in November TVthe week recommends This month's new television releases include ‘I Love L.A.,’ ‘Stranger Things’ and ‘Pluribus’
-
6 homes with fall foliagefeature An autumnal orange Craftsman, a renovated Greek Revival church and an estate with an orchard
