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How Castles Were Built

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BfK No. 111 - July 1998

Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Poetry (cover illustration by Peter Weevers). Edited by Alison Sage (who also edited The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature), this sumptuous anthology is loosely divided into four sections corresponding to age starting with nursery rhymes and first poems through to poems for older children and classic poetry. Poems from such modern poets as Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope and Maya Angelou sit alongside poems by Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley and Shakespeare. The anthology is illustrated in full colour and black and white. Newly commissioned illustrations from, for example, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes and Nicola Bayley are included alongside illustrations by Randolph Caldecott, Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway. With such a comprehensive range of poems for 2-11 year olds and upwards, this is a wonderful family book.

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How Castles Were Built

Peter Hicks
(Wayland)
48pp, NON FICTION, 978-0750221443, RRP £9.99, Library Binding
8-10 Junior/Middle
Buy "How Castles Were Built (The Age of Castles)" on Amazon

One of four in a series on aspects of the history of castles, this title considers castle design and construction in their social, political and military contexts. There is discussion of castles beyond the British Isles and glimpses of some of the sources of the history of fortresses: the medieval Pipe Rolls and Licences to Crenallate. Some of the information will be new to junior school children and it is good to see web sites and videos listed beside books as extra sources. However, the index is poor - no entries for obvious subjects like walls, towers and moat - and there is some padding: the 'Build Your Own Castle' project, with its thick rolls of newspaper, is one I remember from castle books of twenty years ago. The last might well have been replaced by a section on what features to look out for on a visit to a castle - like mason's marks. Sometimes the arrangement of the double page spreads is haphazard, determined more by the need to fit the illustrations in attractively than by the logic of the text.

Reviewer: 
Clive Barnes
3
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