Juliet Townsend

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The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls<br /> by Rosemary Davidson and Sarah Vine

issue 25 August 2007

The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls
by Rosemary Davidson and Sarah Vine

One of the publishing triumphs of last year, The Dangerous Book for Boys, with immaculate timing tapped into a rich vein that combined nostalgia with exasperation at the seemingly unstoppable advance of Nanny State, with her stifling regime of risk assessment and avoidance. It followed a long line of similar books stretching back over 200 years. In fact its objectives were identical to those of the authors of The Boy’s
Own Book of Sports and Pastimes (c. 1840), which was

an attempt to enable those who had the guardianship of youth to present their young protégés, in the form of a Holiday or Birth-day present, with a concentration of all that usually delights them, in a form more amusing and instructive to the juvenile mind than the cheap trash on which their hoarded shillings had been more usually expended.

For ‘cheap trash’ substitute ‘computer games’ — plus ça change.

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