The Complete Thatch the Moon

Sarah McIntyre and her web designer Dan Fone have just created a web page for our free Reeve and McIntyre story, Thatch the Moon. It features links to all five episodes, read for us by the wonderful Amy Sutton, and also some of the Thatch-the-Moon inspired drawings that people have shared with us on Twitter.

And Sarah has turned her artwork into a large and elaborate Thatch The Moon colouring sheet that you can print out and pass to anyone who wants to while away the pandemic with some colouring in - ideally whilst listening to the story.

You can find it all on Sarah's website (where she also has pages devoted to all our books). And if it whets your appetite for McIntyre-authored picture books, don't miss her new one, Don't Call Me Grumpycorn, which has just been published by Scholastic. It should be available from all UK bookshops, but here's a link to one of our favourites, Nottingham's Page 45, who stock all our books and can ship internationally.

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Merlin (1998)

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Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin...

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

One of the reasons the Arthurian Legends appeal so much to writers and film makers is that there is no single original version. If there ever was, it was a tale told by some Romano-British storyteller, sitting by a fire in a damp hall, perhaps expounding on the great deeds of a local ruler or late Roman general, and spicing up the action with some motifs borrowed from old Celtic myths. In the centuries that followed, the story grew, and changed. Lots of legends about other heroes got tacked on to it. French and German poets got hold of it and added Camelot, the Grail, and Courtly Love: Malory borrowed from them all in his Morte D’Arthur . Later, everyone from Tennyson to TH White to Rick Wakeman to little me retold the stories, altering them to fit our own vision and reflect our own times. So you can do whatever you like with King Arthur: everyone else has. At least, that’s the theory. Now here's Guy Ritchie’s 2017 box office catastrophe King Arthur, Legend of the Sword to destru...

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