Children's literature

Tuesday

Erica Wagner

The magic of carefully crafted words

Early one morning, Alan Garner goes to let the hens out. The hens live in a hutch in the garden of Toad Hall in Blackden, Cheshire, a medieval dwelling which Garner has made his home since 1957, not many miles from where all his forebears – artisans and smiths – lived and worked for generations. Something glints in the light, catches his eye. ‘It is thin, translucent, honey-black and sharp; sharper than a surgeon’s steel.’ He knows just what it is. A flint, a tool, a precision instrument. ‘I am the first to know in the eight to ten thousand years since the last hand that held it.’ Alan Garner

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Britain doesn’t have a ‘two-tier’ policing problem

Less is more Sir: While I wholeheartedly agree with Toby Young’s observation that ‘more censorship would make things worse, not better’ (No sacred cows, 10 August), I’m confused by his remedy – ‘more and better speech’. First, how does one decide what better even means, without it becoming a form of censorship? Second, and perhaps more worryingly, it feels like something Stalin might appreciate. ‘Quantity has a quality of its own,’ he once said. In their different ways, both incessant social media and weekly magazines rather disprove that. Grant Feller Fowey, Cornwall Backfiring rioters Sir: The minority who threw bricks, set fire to vehicles and attacked police (‘Mob mentality’, 10

Thursday

James Walton

The fiasco of Operation Yewtree: C4’s The Accused – National Treasures on Trial reviewed

At 4.38 a.m., one morning in October 2013, the radio presenter Paul Gambaccini was understandably asleep when the doorbell rang. He was then arrested for sexually assaulting a minor on what proved to be the word of a drug addict with a history of making false accusations. The trouble for Gambaccini, though, was that this wasn’t proved for another 11 months. In the meantime, the allegations were all over the news, he was dropped by the BBC, lost around £100,000 in earnings and started having panic attacks. And Gambaccini, of course, wasn’t alone in being arrested and publicly named like this – not merely without being charged, but before any