Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Three daemons in a boat

La Belle Sauvage is a terrific read. But if you lose God, you lose the greatest drama of all

issue 21 October 2017

Philip Pullman’s new k, the prequel to his Northern Lights series — the one north Oxford academics very much prefer to Harry Potter — is an intriguing work. It’s notionally set some time near our own, but the world it evokes is the 1950s and 1960s England of the author’s youth.

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