Rod Liddle
Rabbits, always rabbits. I remember at age 13 forcing my poor parents to trudge despondently across hilly downland on the borders between Berkshire and Hampshire, with me jubilantly pointing out stuff like: ‘Look, it’s the combe where Bigwig met the fox!’ and ‘I think this could be the Efrafa warren!’ For a while, Watership Down jostled uneasily with the grown-up stuff I was just beginning to enjoy – Jack Kerouac, James Thurber, Ray Bradbury – but it still held a big claim on me and does today. Better than On the Road, isn’t it? Watership Down also took me back from the awkwardness of puberty to the safety zone of post-toddlerdom and, of course, Brer Rabbit. I was seven before I got out of my Brer Rabbit obsession – you could keep Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, but I couldn’t get enough of her purloined Deep South rabbit stories. You can never have enough rabbits. One evening a couple of months ago, I watched the rabbits in my garden browsing nervily and said to my now grown-up daughter: ‘Look, they’re out for silflay.’ She grinned, slightly embarrassed. Watership Down has stayed with her, too.
Rory Sutherland
Look, I don’t know why we are even debating this. It has to be Dr Seuss’s Cat in the Hat. If it has any precedent, it must be Saki’s short-story The Storyteller, in which a lone traveller silences a train compartment containing a prim aunt and a gaggle of unruly children by telling them a wonderfully amoral and ‘improper’ story in which a terribly good girl called Bertha is rewarded for her goodness by being eaten by a wolf.
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