Children's Books: A Week in Books Philip Pullman Children's Books Must Join the Euro Zone

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WHEN I was a boy, one of my favourite books was Erich Kastner's Emil and the Detectives, known to English readers since the 1930s. I also loved Tove Jansson's delightful fantasies about the Moomin family, who lived in a weird but believable Finland. And I well remember Paul Berna's A Hundred Million Francs, set in the sort of shabby Parisian banlieue that turns up so often in the films of the nouvelle vague. Emil's Berlin, and the Baltic resort of its sequel Emil and the Three Twins, were as vivid to me as Arthur Ransome's English Lakeland. I hadn't been there either, but what did that matter when I could read all about it?

Publishers in those days found it possible to …