One was Jack and the Beanstalk, whose narrative has been shrunk into a shocking apologia for theft. First came two terrible, sanitised reworkings of fairytales in the Ladybird touch-and-feel library that made me suspicious of what moral agendas lay beneath. It's been a weird re-initiation into children's literature. I came back to Beatrix Potter only recently, when reading to my 15-month-old daughter. Mr McCracken Peck seems to have forgotten, for instance, that Squirrel Nutkin is reduced to a gibbering wreck by the final page, hurling sticks at anyone who asks him how he lost his bushy tail (the reader knows: it was snipped off by Old Brown Owl). I have just one problem with that - the idea that Potter's world is in any way comforting.
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