Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.

For an author just starting out, you've got to deliver the goods every year or sooner or people will forget you or you will lose momentum. There is a contract that exists between author and reader.

I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer.

We all make mistakes at some time in our lives, some more than others. It is only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice.

Do you really think you'd win a PR war against a bunch of committed librarians?' He thought about this, but he knew I was right. The libraries were a treasured institution and so central to everyday life that government and commerce rarely did anything that might upset them.Some say they were more powerful than the military, or, if not, they were certainly quieter. As they say: Don't mess with librarians. Only they use a stronger word than 'mess'.