"In 1929, Arthur Ransome (1884-1967), a journalist and war correspondent who was on the books of MI6, turned his hand to writing adventure stories for children. The result was Swallows and Amazons and eleven more wonderful books followed, spanning inpublication the turbulent years from 1930 to 1947. They changed the course of children's literature and have never been out of print since. In them, Ransome creates a world of escape so close to reality that it is utterly believable, a world in which things always turn out right in the end. Yet Swallows, Amazons and Coots shows that, to be properly appreciated today, the novels must be read as products of their era, inextricably bound up with Ransome's life and times as he bore witness to the end of Empire and the dark days of the Second World War. In the first critical book devoted wholly to the series, Julian Lovelock explores each novel in turn, offering an erudite assessment of Ransome's creative process and narrative technique, and highlighting his contradictory politics, his defence of rural England, and his reflections on colonialism and the place of women in society. Thus Lovelock demonstrates convincingly that, despite first appearances, the novels challenge as much as reinforce the pervading attitudes of their time.Written with a lightness of touch and enlivened by Ransome's own illustrations, Swallows, Amazons and Coots is both fresh and nostalgic. It will appeal to anyone who has enjoyed the world of Swallows and Amazons, and there is plenty here to challenge both the student and the Ransome enthusiast."

In 1929, Arthur Ransome (1884-1967), a journalist and war correspondent who was on the books of MI6, turned his hand to writing adventure stories for children. The result was Swallows and Amazons and eleven more wonderful books followed, spanning inpublication the turbulent years from 1930 to 1947. They changed the course of children's literature and have never been out of print since. In them, Ransome creates a world of escape so close to reality that it is utterly believable, a world in which things always turn out right in the end. Yet Swallows, Amazons and Coots shows that, to be properly appreciated today, the novels must be read as products of their era, inextricably bound up with Ransome's life and times as he bore witness to the end of Empire and the dark days of the Second World War. In the first critical book devoted wholly to the series, Julian Lovelock explores each novel in turn, offering an erudite assessment of Ransome's creative process and narrative technique, and highlighting his contradictory politics, his defence of rural England, and his reflections on colonialism and the place of women in society. Thus Lovelock demonstrates convincingly that, despite first appearances, the novels challenge as much as reinforce the pervading attitudes of their time.Written with a lightness of touch and enlivened by Ransome's own illustrations, Swallows, Amazons and Coots is both fresh and nostalgic. It will appeal to anyone who has enjoyed the world of Swallows and Amazons, and there is plenty here to challenge both the student and the Ransome enthusiast.

In 1973 Sophie Neville was cast as Titty alongside Virginia McKenna, Ronald Fraser and Suzanna Hamilton in the film Swallows & Amazons. Made before the advent of digital technology, the child stars lived out Arthur Ransome's epic adventure in the great outdoors without ever seeing a script. Encouraged by her mother, Sophie Neville kept a diary about her time filming on location in the lakes and mountains of Cumbria. Bouncy and effervescent, extracts from her childhood diary are interspersed among her memories of the cast and crew as well as photographs, maps and newspaper articles, offering a child's eye view of the making of the film from development to premiere - and the aftermath.

Who were Shakespeare's 'Friend' and the 'Dark Lady'? Why did Donne risk his life and ruin his career for a seventeen-year-old girl? Why did Wordsworth's sister retire to her bed on his wedding day? Writing never takes place in a vacuum and much of the finest poetry in the English language has been inspired by particular people - patrons, spouses, lovers, friends, or just casual acquaintances. Whether relegated to an obscurity they do not deserve or thrust into prominence they did not seek, their importance to the creative process is inescapable. In Where All the Ladders Start, Julian Lovelock discusses with characteristic incisiveness and enthusiasm nine major British poets and the real lives behind some of their most personal and significant works. Along the way he shows how poetry has developed over the past four hundred years and provides suggestions for further reading, while for convenience all of the relevant poems and extracts are reproduced in full. Written for both the seasoned reader and the student encountering these poems for the first time, Lovelock's analysis will inspire and entertain in equal measure.

Risk in Children’s Adventure Literature examines the way in which adults discuss the reading and entertainment habits of children, and with it the assumption that adventure is a timeless and stable constant whose meaning and value is self-evident. A closer enquiry into British and American adventure texts for children over the past 150 years reveals a host of complexities occluded by the term, and the ways in which adults invoke adventure as a means of attempting to get to grips with the nebulous figure of ‘the child’. Writing about adventure also necessitates writing about risk, and this book argues that adults have historically used adventure to conceptualise the relationship between children and risk: the risks children themselves pose to society; the risks that threaten their development; and how they can be trained to manage risk in socially normative and desirable ways. Tracing this tendency back to its development and consolidation in Victorian imperial romance, and forward through various adventure texts and media to the present day, this book probes and investigates the truisms and assumptions that underlie our generalisations about children’s love for adventure, and how they have evolved since the mid-nineteenth century.

The stories we read as children are the ones that stay with us the longest, and from the nineteenth century until the 1950s stories about schools held a particular fascination. Many will remember the goings-on at such earnest establishments as Tom Brown's Rugby, St Dominic's, Greyfriars, the Chalet School, Malory Towers and Linbury Court. In the second part of the twentieth century, with more liberal social attitudes and the advent of secondary education for all, these moral tales lost their appeal and the school story very nearly died out. More recently, however, a new generation of compromised schoolboy and schoolgirl heroes - Pennington, Tyke Tiler, Harry Potter and Millie Roads - have given it a new and challenging relevance. Focusing mainly on novels written for young people, From Morality to Mayhem charts the fall and rise of the school story, from the grim accounts of Victorian times to the magic and mayhem of our own age. In doing so it considers how fictional schools not only reflect but sometimes influence real life. This captivating study will appeal to those interested in children's literature and education, both students and the general reader, taking us on a not altogether comfortable trip down memory lane.

The fictional Walker children, are much loved characters in Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, a quintessentially English family in an archetypal English children's classic. However, it was an Anglo-Armenian family from Aleppo who were the catalyst and inspiration. Swallows and Armenians is a book of short stories and essays which firmly re-establishes the connection, using newly-appraised correspondence and diaries. 'With her beautifully researched complement to Arthur Ransome’s classic and still best-selling series, Karen Babayan has opened a much-loved children’s adventure epic, set in the iconically British Lake District, to an enriching cross-cultural re-worlding. By revealing the Anglo-Armenian identity of the children who inspired the gripping tale of sailing, piracy and intrigue, she has created new stories resonant in our own times of conflict, displacement, and dangerous nationalisms. Unveiling Ransome’s anglicization of the Altounyan children, Karen Babayan restores them to their central place in British literature. She also links their crossing of Syrian Aleppo and Armenian cuisine with a once-Viking Cumbria to her own bi-cultural identity and traumatic familial experience of displacement and migration, loss and adaptation, all shadowed by the terror of the Armenian genocide (1915-17). By creative storytelling, Swallows and Armenians intervenes as much in diasporic Armenian as British cultural memory by vibrantly reanimating the voices of these extraordinary children who speak back across her pages from a past she has recreated to a present that needs them now.' Professor Griselda Pollock, Laureate of the Holberg Prize for Arts and Humanities 2020