Learn a new word every day. the most flourishing period in the history of a nation, literature, people, etc. Deep down, we all still want the story to end happily. The first book I read to myself was Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat – something I still recommend to learners – and the Cat's wild anarchic humour has always struck me as the perfect analogy for what happens to a child who discovers books. 5. Far from reassuring readers that some authority is benign, it is portrayed as unequivocally malignant, corrupted by ecological disaster, politics, greed and war. 4. You can find our Community Guidelines in full here. A period of great peace, prosperity, and happiness. More usually, they are set in the future, against the cataclysms produced by current trends. Welcome to the Golden Age of American medicine. Even if I personally never wish to be sent another book about a little lost kitten, Black Beauty laid the foundation for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The emphasis in the First Golden Age was very much on being healthy in mind and body – if a child became sick, he or she usually got well as part of their story.

However, just one book by Walliams, Awful Auntie, earned his publisher, HarperCollins, more than £6m last year. I trace this back to a novel which was not written for children at all, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, but it has spread into best-selling books like Ways to Live Forever, Before I Say Goodbye and many more. Stevenson's young hero, Jim Hawkins, foreshadows the plucky resourcefulness of Anthony Horowitz's reluctant teenage spy, and Eoin Colfer's criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl.

Start your Independent Premium subscription today. What made you want to look up golden age? A chick-lit author can hope for 100,000. Now, the darkness and violence of contemporary dystopias is highly politicised. Lu Hersey: Deep Water (Usborne 12+) - Danni's mother disappears, her Dad takes her to Cornwall and she is battling old evil with new magic.

By this way, you could tell her that she is your queen! There are many examples of this guiding, protective, mysterious figure in the Second Golden Age.

Here Be Dragons: A Creature Identification Quiz. Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island has also fallen out of favour with present-day readers, but any number of adventure stories, from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book to The Action Hero's Handbook derive from it. Her success, and that of Philip Pullman, excited more and more interest in children's books which, up till then, had been seen as the Cinderella of publishing. Test Your Knowledge - and learn some interesting things along the way. Vivian French & Angela Barrett: The Most Wonderful Thing in the World (Walker 7+) - A Venetian Princess can only be won by the best - least expected - gift. No longer. The business of America was business. These are what many now think of as quintessential children's books. The people of the Golden Age were formed by or for the Titan Cronus, whom the Romans called Saturn. Delivered to your inbox! Ipads have enabled books to become animated, with sound, music, special pop-up features that young children especially love to explore. Racism has become completely unacceptable, and there are authors from Mary Hoffman to Malorie Blackman who tell wonderful stories of children for whom skin colour is no obstacle. But they also give a child a lever with which to prise open the world. For the past 15 years I've reviewed children's books. Who will win the chase? Our journalists will try to respond by joining the threads when they can to create a true meeting of independent Premium. A top historian such as Antony Beevor might shift that many too.

This may seem daunting, but a great children's book portrays an environment in which the young are not powerless. Please continue to respect all commenters and create constructive debates. I'd argue that we are now living in a Golden Age of children's literature. Plenty of other terrific novels such as Scott Westerfeld's Uglies, Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses, Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now and Moira Young's Blood Red Road depict our future as ravaged by science, racism, war, genetic mutation or most credibly, exams.

A spooky comedy turns into a heartening account of teenage depression especially for boys. Her stories, whether magical or not, are firmly rooted in the real world and have been hugely influential on books of the Second Golden Age – Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci books, Lucy M Boston's Green Knowe series, Joan Aiken's Wolves of Willoughby Chase sequence and Eva Ibbotson's hilarious witches and ghosts. Please be respectful when making a comment and adhere to our Community Guidelines. During this period, the area is in a state of advancements, peace, prosperity and stressing the point on the arts, and architecture. Bullies were hated in Tom Brown's Schooldays but now, as in Louis Sachar's Holes, they are both villains and victims.

E Nesbit has perhaps given us the strongest DNA of all. Today's reader has no such encouragement. They are what parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, teachers and godparents actually buy, and go on buying. Can they save each other and the Psammead?

With the advent of YA fiction for secondary school pupils, not only death but sex has become part of the picture – in fact, with novels such as Twilight, it's central to it. Cute Golden Clothes with her age will make your little daughter smile all day! 'Nip it in the butt' or 'Nip it in the bud'?

Yet children's literature is hugely important. Mslexia prize-winner; excellent. For many Americans, the 1950s were the golden age of American history. But it's not the first time that children's books as an art-form have blossomed. Kate Saunders: Five Children on the Western Front (Faber, 9+) - E Nesbit's children fight in the First World War. Anthony McGowan: Pike (Barrington Stoke 8-14+) - Written in direct, dramatic language, a boy and his disabled brother brave deep waters and brutal gangsters in search of gold. It is children's authors who are what Shelley called "the unacknowledged legislators of the world".

John Green's The Fault in Our Stars earned Penguin UK more than £4m. Children's books are, paradoxically, one of the most important forms of writing we have, and the most overlooked. Emily Hughes: The Little Gardener (Flying Eye Books 6+) - A tiny gardener delights in the garden that is his home but it is dying, until a human child helps. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? But these futures were the product of natural catastrophe or alien invasion. That is not to say that all the books earning these sums are any good.

Dystopia isn't new: in my own childhood there were superb writers such as John Christopher, whose Prince in Waiting trilogy should be much better-known. Birthday Gifts – Golden T-Shirt. See the full definition for golden age in the English Language Learners Dictionary, Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for golden age, Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about golden age. In a society where, once again, the gap between rich and poor children is widening, it is crucial for young people to imagine what it is like not to be themselves. We think it's about being good – remember how the kids in the story are made to "sit-sit-sit-sit/ And we did not like it/ Not one little bit"? But once you master this, everything changes. This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional. Alan Garner's Colin and Susan have the wizard Cadellin, and Frodo Baggins's Companions have Gandalf. [*] This was the true aera of the, All this long harangue (which might very well have been spared) our knight delivered because the acorns they gave him reminded him of the, Then, think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the, THE fifteenth century, the century in which King James I reigned and died, has been called the ", "It's the easiest thing in the world," said the Story Girl, tiptoeing to the edge of the pool to peep at her own arch reflection, as some nymph left over from the, When the first poet or romancer told these marvellous legends (such is Eustace Bright's opinion), it was still the, Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a, He received them with the hospitality of the, George I., an infant of eighteen, and a scraggy nest of foreign office holders, sit in the places of Themistocles, Pericles, and the illustrious scholars and generals of the, In the picture men lived again in a kind of pastoral, My first quarter at Lowood seemed an age; and not the, Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus - The Free Dictionary, the webmaster's page for free fun content. When asked when America was great, Donald Trump pointed to the post-war era of the 1940s and 1950s. The…

John Green's The Fault in Our Stars which I mentioned at the start, is about two teenagers with terminal cancer who fall in love. The creative potential for books in a visual sense is growing all the time. Full of clever twists and genuine humanity. No one worked or grew unhappy.

From AA Milne's rodents in tweed to Michelle Paver's Wolf Brother, this is a kind of story which delights in animals as creatures very like children. A tender girl will really like this lovely present, especially roses! Are you sure you want to mark this comment as inappropriate? It portrayed the battle between good and evil – most famously in Tolkien – as an absolute struggle, and it did so in the wake of the Second World War. Mortals lived like gods, never knowing sorrow or toil; when they died, it as if they were falling asleep.

The kind of books we think of when talking about children's literature are hardly ever those given large advances, and often they show little sign of being the best-sellers they become. Reading involves sitting, and getting a child to stay still is one of its most unattractive aspects. This time, we were told, we needed to save the world. I find the portrayal of such tragedy to the vulnerable teenager mawkish, reprehensible and even dangerous. Many children's authors – not just JK Rowling, but David Walliams, Julia Donaldson, Francesca Simon and Anthony Horowitz – have sales of the kind that would make any author of fiction or non-fiction weep with joy. The American economy was humming as never before.

Yet for most of the time, children's books are treated as infantile, escapist or easy to write. 'All Intensive Purposes' or 'All Intents and Purposes'? Her stories of impoverishment, bullying and exile have a consistent following and a marked influence on authors such as Jacqueline Wilson. Where there might have been, say, five or six leading authors in my own childhood, today there are probably over a hundred. They allow a child to escape from what is real and, as importantly, return to reality in a better frame of mind. The Tang and Song Dynasties are very important to the history of Chinese civilization. Send us feedback. If you think of some of the books which you may have loved in your own childhood – novels such as Little Women, say, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – and try to re-read them to your children, you quickly come up against concepts such as duty, self-sacrifice and not complaining which tend to be quite alien. Independent Premium Comments can be posted by members of our membership scheme, Independent Premium. The child's heroism lies not in following instructions but in defiance, truancy and rebellion. How to use a word that (literally) drives some pe... Do you know what languages these words come from? Due to the sheer scale of this comment community, we are not able to give each post the same level of attention, but we have preserved this area in the interests of open debate.