The papers in this collection come out of a conference held at Homerton College, Cambridge, in 1992, entitled “Beyond Words”. Like many such collections, it’s a mixed bag, but some of the contributions are well worth having.

Jenny Daniels, for example, offers a subtle reading of some comics, including the Beano and Bunty, and sees something of great importance: the completeness of a page, and the significance of all the unconsidered little bits that hide in corners. She’s good on the differences between boys’ and girls’ reading, and the way in which boys and men “just happen” to find the problem page the one section in women’s or girls’ magazines that’s of any interest; but I think she underestimates the range of graphic texts that boys go on to after the Beano. Boys (and men) form the larger part of the readership of the Hernandez brothers’ challenging Love and Rockets, for example, and it might be partly because they find “the perplexing adult world of sexuality and development” explored there at least as profoundly as in the problem page of a girls’ comic.

Morag Styles, in an essay on children and “great literature”, touches on a question that perplexes many of us: “Do we admire Pearce, Le Guin, Garner et al because they speak directly to most adults as well as to children? . . . Do Dahl, Blyton, Blume, and maybe, in a different way, Rosen appeal exclusively to children?” She goes on to consider the appeal of Enid Blyton in particular, and then describes a project in which she worked with a class of nine to 11-year-olds on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Teachers will recognise both the unexpected incomprehension that sometimes cropped up (“Am I that geezer, Hermia?”) as well as the passionate involvement that resulted from her refusal to patronise.

Shakespeare is always with us, but media education comes and goes according to the whims of those in charge of the national curriculum. The latest revisions allow for a greater emphasis on it, I’m glad to see, and in this context Avril Harpley’s piece on learning to read the media is timely and useful.

It is pleasing to find a story in the collection. Ben Haggarty is a vivid storyteller, and this example, “Eaten Father, Eaten Mother” (adapted from four East European traditional tales) is a good gruesome example of his skill. Other story tellers are present, too; Jill Paton Walsh writes on memory and its place in writing for children; and Robert Leeson in a fine piece makes plain how “the unconscious mind may be more deeply political than the conscious”. Stories carry with them all kinds of assumptions, like trace elements, and writers must not avoid the responsibility of their calling: “It is no use writers saying their function is just to entertain.”