Harry potter

Martin Stewart’s Riverkeep (Penguin, £7.99) has a list of books and writers on the cover: Moby-Dick, The Wizard of Oz, Ursula Le Guin, Charles Dickens and, less ambitiously, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman and Skellig. And, right in the middle, Riverkeep. Pff, you think: they wish! But you know what? Having read the book, there are elements of all these authors in it: Moby-Dick for the quest for a great sea monster; The Wizard of Oz for a homunculus who retains his self, even when he loses his stuffing; Ursula Le Guin for the creation of a coherent other world where magic is part and parcel of things; and perhaps Dickens

Is it true that, having lost an empire, we reinvented ourselves as an island of entertainers? Do we channel the same rigour and vigour into film and music and literature as once went into conquering continents? Is there a residual colonialist bias in our arts, seen, for instance, in our cinematic penchant for creating patriotic period dramas such as Henry V or The King’s Speech? How much of our cultural success depends on the US market and the accident of a shared language? To what extent does our cultural expression reflect not our idea of ourselves but an American distortion? Do international smash hits such as Julian Fellowes’s languid TV

We live in disenchanted times. We barely do God, most of us don’t do magic and frenzied consumerism occupies our minds more than any local spirit of place. At first glance it looks as though the supernatural folktales of old — those witches and giants who lend their names to pools or hilltop crags in Britain’s remoter spots — are all but lost. From this premise, the medievalist Carolyne Larrington examines the stories that characterise some of Britain’s place names, and considers how the mythological patterns of fairy brides and rampaging dragons might have shaped the way our ancestors saw both the places they inhabited and the world at large.

Go to any bookshop — always supposing you’re fortunate enough to have any left in your neck of the woods — and chances are that lots of window space will be given over to two genres — children’s books and cookbooks. Step inside, and the children’s books are under your nose. Last year, children’s books were the fastest growing section of the books market. Yet the amount of space given over to children’s fiction and literature in the forums — newspapers and arts programmes — where we talk about books is remarkably small. We brood endlessly over Bookerish novels; when it comes to children’s, however, the genre is generally lumped