Since the First World War the young had left the countryside in their thousands, leaving a beautiful and rather run-down rural landscape. This was infinitely appealing to the middle classes, who could see it as a lovely playground full of history and mystery, and suitable for hiking, boating and all manner of adventures for children. The rural background to all those friendly and welcoming farmers was, in reality, one of economic and social stagnation in which farmers had to supplement their incomes in any way they could. When farmers began to prosper and agriculture became intensive, an entire genre of children's fiction was effectively wiped out by Common Market farming subsidies. (p. 82).

For we should be quite clear about this: the adult critic or teacher who sees in The Borrowers only a cosy story about tiny people in a miniature world knows less about it than the young reader. And it is difficult to see how adult commentators can contribute much to any discussion, let alone develop the responses of young readers, if they know less about a children's book or series than young readers who have read it - perhaps more than once - from beginning to end. (p. 134).

Antonia Forest wrote ten Marlow novels (twelve, if we include two related historical novels). If her work were in print she would be acknowledged as at least one of the best writers for children in English, and - in my view - the only writer of a sustained series who can be measured seriously alongside Arthur Ransome. (p. 174).

In seeking to find new ways of representing the inner and outer lives of children, Gene Kemp is a great innovator, bringing children's fiction closer than it has ever been to the literacies of actual classrooms. At a period in which the dangerous place of children is so centrally and problematically urgent in British culture, these novels provide a complete account of childhood in contemporary society; the fact that they are given in the words of children amounts to a challenge, for the closer these novels come to resembling the developing literacies of children, the harder it is for adults to see them as literary. (pp. 203-204).