“Yugoslavia, and the Balkans in general, are one of the world centers of tallness. The great physical anthropologist Carleton Coon’s study of the Ghegs of North Albania is entitled ‘The Mountain of Giants’. Jerry Pournelle tol[…]

dateline angel: just spent half an hour wandering round wonderin WHAT STARTED ME on SF at all? some possibilities…
i. dr duck and the duckleks (sole ref on web = mex10000000) — i remember only the climax of one ep (bcz i wz bein babysat a[…]

51 years old, and more widely known in the UK as A Hundred Million Francs, this rereads as potently as ever, despite the by-now somewhat clunky translation (the always tricky problem of slang). Gaby’s is I think the BEST KID GANG EVER — t[…]

Mark’s post on twins poses an interesting question – where did kid-lit twins vanish to? – and then lets it tantalisingly hang. So here’s two half-baked explanations!
i. A shift in the idea of kid-ness. When the heroes of child[…]

The slightly redundant twins in THE RUNNERS raised the entire historical question of TWINS IN KID-LIT: whence it came and where it went — A.Ransom’s various gangs and combos delivered one early set: Port and Starboard in Coot Club and The[…]

Joan Tate was a friend of the family: her lovely husband Clive worked closely with my dad on wildlife stuff; her kids babysat me and my sister when we were very wee and mum and dad wanted to go off and do young ppl’s dancing and that; and she w[…]

My parents brought me up to be an Enid Blyton snob so I never read any of the FAMOUS FIVE stories — for me the kids-in-gangs-solve-crimes milieu begins a bit obliquely, with E.Nesbit (intra-family adventures in and around the home, no crimes so[…]

The story of the Moomins, visible within and between the frames of documentary Moomin Memories, is – most crudely – the story of a journey from the radical to the sentimental. The moomins begin visual life as marginalia in Tove Jansson&#8[…]

As we all know, second-hand bookshops are dangerous places. Most fall into two categories: 1) evil-smelling dungeons guarded by Bernard Black where the books don’t even have any writing on the spines 2) cosy treasure-nests that you cannot bear […]

ICE STATION ZEBRA by Alistair Maclean
This was in the library of the school I left aged 12, so was probbly 9 or 10 when I first read it. This is OK: it’s Bond-for-preteens viz NO SEX!! In fact, in Zebra at least, NO WOMEN AT ALL hurrah er boo a[…]