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Barnes Bookshelf

2020
2019
2018
2017
2016

Ade Edmondson

  • May 6, 2017·
I think I was about nine when I read The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. It was the first time I’d encountered wordplay. It’s full of brilliant puns and linguistic tricks, and a very funny, very short, and very cross policeman called Officer Shrift.
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Peter Bowles

  • April 14, 2016·
I learned to read very young when I was three at our little village school. I grew up in a home that didn’t have any books but when I went to my Grandfather’s I would read The Pilgrim’s Progress and Brer Rabbit and the Uncle Remus stories; the Tar-Baby is the one…
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Barbara Laban

  • April 14, 2016·
Funny enough, for someone growing up in Germany it is most common to name the Swedish Astrid Lindgren as your favourite children’s book author. I am no exception. Week after week I couldn’t wait to go to the library to take out another one of her books and follow the…
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Lisa O’Kelly

  • April 14, 2016·
I adored Enid Blyton as a child and devoured all her Famous Five and Secret Seven books when I was very young. Agatha Christie’s mysteries were a huge favourite in my early teens, too. But if I had to name the book I treasured most when I was growing up…
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Clara Salaman

  • April 14, 2016·
As a child I was obsessed with the Tintin books. I devoured them all – I loved the plots and the dashing destinations although I found Tintin himself a bit priggish with his pulled up socks and his moral outrage.However Captain Haddock more than made up for him. I thought…
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Rev’d Richard Sewell

  • April 14, 2016·
I was sent away to boarding school at a young age so I had more time for reading that I really wished for. Thankfully, it taught me a love of reading which has stayed with me for my whole life. One of the first books which I enjoyed was the…
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Andrew Wilson

  • April 14, 2016·
One of my favourite children’s books you, and many people, may never have heard of is called The Little Grey Men by BB, the nom de plume of Denys Watkins-Pitchford. I have always had a love of nature and wide open spaces and this book is about the last gnomes left in…
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Melissa Jones

  • February 9, 2016·
For me, it’s Flambards by KM Peyton.  Girlhood, horses and the English countryside, first love and the birth of the aeroplane set on the brink of the First World War. The most beautiful writing and compelling story. Horses with names such as Sweetbriar and Woodpigeon are still with me.
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Sarah Govett

  • February 9, 2016·
My favourite book as a teenager was The Crysalids by John Wyndham – dystopia before they were using the term. I read it aged 12, 14, 16 and 26. It’s a powerful and unsettling coming of age story set in a post-nuclear community where intolerance and religious conservatism reign. Difference,…
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Mary Hooper

  • February 9, 2016·
I was born and brought up in Barnes and several of my YA historical books are set here. My At the House of the Magician trilogy (Bloomsbury) begins in Mortlake at the home of Dr Dee. I’ve always loved reading historical and slightly spooky books, but my all-time favourite read…
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Anja de Jager

  • February 9, 2016·
My favourite childhood book is Crusade in Jeans which I first read when I was  eight or nine. It’s a very famous Dutch children’s book written by Thea Beckman about a modern-day boy who gets throw back in time and lands in the middle of the children’s crusade of 1212 when thousands…
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Daisy Waugh

  • February 9, 2016·
My favourite childhood book is The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett- it may even be my favourite adult book, too. I still read it when I am feeling ill or generally in need of a fillip. As a child I used to hate reading about nature – or the…
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Marcia Williams

  • February 9, 2016·
When I was a child I loved being read aloud to as well as reading to myself. My mother would sometimes read to us at teatime, but best of all was being read to when you were cosy and under the covers at night. I remember weeping buckets over Black…
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Fiona Smith Patron

  • February 9, 2016·
As an avid reader from an early age I liked to re-read well loved books and a few well thumbed children’s stories remained in the loft when I cleared the family home. The best loved was Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women which I knew almost by heart. Two others that are…
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Lisa Ross

  • February 9, 2016·
I grew up in Barnes and now I live here with my family. All of my four kids loved The Gruffalo, which was published when my first child was born in 1999. We loved how cunning the mouse was on his journey through the forest meeting various animals who all wanted…
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Sophie Farrah

  • February 9, 2016·
It has always been about magical worlds and epic adventures for me; Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were firm favourites when I was growing up. I also loved The Wardstone Chronicles by Joseph Delaney. I was 11 when the first Harry Potter book came out and I was hooked immediately!…
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Samuel Cullis

  • February 9, 2016·
I was introduced to the crime fiction author Elmore Leonard in my late teens at around the same time that I discovered Quentin Tarantino as a film director. Leonard’s huge influence on Tarantinois evident in all of his films. From the first page of Freaky Deaky the writer captivated me with the…
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Irene Cockcroft

  • February 9, 2016·
Having been born in semi-rural Australia in war-time I was deprived of books. This did not affect the development of my natural love of books and language. My father taught me to read by reading aloud the Ginger Megs newspaper comic strip whilst I followed the printed ‘word bubbles’. The one book…
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Gyles Brandreth

  • February 9, 2016·
I was brought up in London and my first school was the French Lycée in South Kensington, so the first books I remember reading were the adventures of Barbar the Elephant and The Adventures of Tintin. I loved the illustrations as much as the words. I loved the works of…
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Claire Boyling

  • February 9, 2016·
I loved reading: under the bed covers with a torch, inside the linen cupboard, on my grandmother’s rather large window ledge. Anywhere I could get a bit of peace and quiet in fact. Favourites included all the Secret Seven books, Moonfleet, the Narnia titles and a series of books about…
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Isla Blair

  • February 9, 2016·
Favourites were The Railway Children and The Secret Garden but the book I related to most was A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I too, was born in India like it’s heroine Sarah, and I was sent away to boarding school when I was aged  six with long gaps…
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David Mackintosh

  • February 9, 2016·
The best book I read and re-read as a child was Grimble by Clement Freud. It is very humorous plus it has a lot of recipes in it. I think it must have been the first of its kind. But my favourite part is the bit where Grimble starts delivering…
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Sir Tim Rice

  • February 9, 2016·
My favourite childhood book was Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School, or any of the Bunter books by Frank Richards. The Billy Bunter books were wonderfully funny tales of a fat schoolboy and his pals. There was a marvellous cast of both teachers and pupils, and although the principal character had…
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Smriti Pasadam

  • February 9, 2016·
I read all the time as a child and had a different favourite book every week, but if I had to pick just one particularly special book then I’d sayThe Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. To this day I can remember being read that story and I love it as…
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Charley Boorman

  • February 9, 2016·
My favourite children’s author would be that famous Irish storyteller, Eoin Colfer. His Artemis Fowl books are just fantastic. I love all the magic that is wrapped up with that lovely Irish mystery and humour, with leprechauns and fairies as well as cool technology. You have to read them!
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Jim Smith

  • February 9, 2016·
My favourite book when I was a kid was Roald Dahl’s George’s Marvellous Medicine. I completely used up my mum’s stock of Oil of Ulay trying to replicate his potion! I also loved The Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. The descriptions were so real to me, I can still hear…
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David Harsent

  • February 9, 2016·
It’s almost true to say that my favourite book, as a child, was any book I could manage to lay hands on. I read all the time. My parents claimed that I read in my sleep.
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Caroline Clough

  • February 9, 2016·
My favourite children’s book without a shadow of a doubt is Jill’s Gymkhana by Ruby Ferguson. I have a very old copy which I got with my pocket money from a jumble sale as a little girl. After reading the book about Jill and her pony, Black Boy, I became so…
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