Literature

One thing which struck me immediately on surveying the books on offer for children this Christmas is the large number which are really toys, with only a minor bookish element. Walker Books have produced several of these this year. Cars by Robert Crowther (£12.99) boasts moveable pop-ups of cars ancient and modern, with realistic detail and turning wheels, from the Mini to the Bluebird, culminating in a full fold-out model of a Formula 1 racetrack. There is an informative text, but it is definitely subordinate to the models. The same is true of Gladiators by Toby Forward, illustrated by Steve Noon, (£16.99). This includes a book about the Roman games, but the main attraction is the spectacular pop-up model of the Colosseum.

‘Everything that the lovingest of husbands can express to the best of wives, & love to the little ones, not forgetting the kicker in the dark,’ Jack Verney wrote to his pregnant wife in 1683. ‘Everything that the lovingest of husbands can express to the best of wives, & love to the little ones, not forgetting the kicker in the dark,’ Jack Verney wrote to his pregnant wife in 1683. I read this 326 years later with a pleasurable frisson. I don’t know why it is so charming to find that our ancestors felt as we do, but it is. In Louisa Lane Fox’s fascinating anthology, that thrill of recognition is found on nearly every page. Lane Fox has used letters, diaries and memoirs; nothing fictional.

Not every writer would begin a history of the 1950s with a vignette in which the young Keith Waterhouse treads on Princess Margaret by mistake. But David Kynaston is an unusual historian, rewardingly imbued with a sense of fun and convinced of the importance of the freakish; he is enamoured of the single incident and the obscure observer. Family Britain is as vivacious and alluring as Sabrina, the Ted’s pin-up, ‘symbol of opulent sex’, real name Norma Sykes, who pops up on page 608 between Peter Maxwell Davies and Sylvia Plath. I suppose she may still be alive. This is the second volume in a projected series, Tales of a New Jerusalem, chronicle rather than a history, which will eventually cover the period between 1945 to 1979.