Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Roald Dahl understands that the interests of children, which are to get into as many things as possible as thoroughly as possible, and the interests of adults, which are to get children to shut up and sit down, are not just incompatible but war. Reading him brings me back vividly to a time when the daily battle was to get around the unpredictably cranky obstacles of grown-ups in order to get to the important things, like climbing all the way through that culvert to see where it comes out, or turning the living room into a space ship by covering everything in it in tin foil, or even being left alone to read whatever deeply inappropriate book has caught one's fancy.

TMI Dept: I don't know if it's some kind of deep proto-adolescent imprinting thing or what, but I am hot for Quentin Blake's illustrations of Miss Honey.