HisDarkMaterials.org

Philip Pullman's birthday is today, the 19th of October. Let us give thanks to Dust for sticking to this magnificent human being for so long and enhancing his writing skills!

The learning curve from teaching to writing has taught Philip Pullman a simple lesson: children don't want literature, they want to be told a story

Philip Pullman's story - impoverished diligence rewarded, wildest dreams granted - is a bit of a fairytale, really, so it's no wonder he's keen on them himself. He has already written a version of Puss in Boots, and now his Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp (Scholastic

Recently, his accountant put a curious question to him: 'What do you do to enjoy your money?' Pullman looked at him blankly. The idea of enjoying it hadn't occurred to him. On reflection, he realised that the greatest luxury provided by the success of the His Dark Materials trilogy is being able to make everyday purchases without anxiety. He buys books. He shops at Sainsbury's. He pays off the gas bill. These are things he has always done, but no longer has to worry about them.

Those who have read and loved His Dark Materials will long for more for him, yet there's a rightness to his modesty, too. Pullman's trilogy, following a scrap of a girl called Lyra as she makes an epic journey through a succession of worlds lit by naphtha, traversed by zeppelins and sledges, and animated by daemons, gypsies and witches, was one of the greatest reading treats I've had in adulthood.

While it lasted, life was suspended: pans boiled over, damp laundry rotted and children went unfed. Characters - supernatural or human - are convincingly governed by their own internal logic. Leaving His Dark Materials, with its pace, pageantry and Big Ideas, felt like going into deep mourning.

Pullman is a tall, mild-looking man with twin puffs of hair on either side of his skull, Sven-type spectacles and startling grass-green socks. He agrees that retelling a fairy-tale such as Aladdin feels like a little holiday after the rigours of plotting Lyra's adventures.

'Being given a story that's already there to tell is like being given a very good car to drive. All the gears work. But it's important not to let these great stories go out of circulation. If the only version of Little Red Riding Hood children hear is Roald Dahl's, when she pulls a gun out of her knickers and shoots them all dead, they're being impoverished. They need to hear the stories pretty straight, not just because they're immensely wonderful, but so that later on they can read the Roald Dahl story and enjoy a twist on the original.'

For 12 years, Pullman was an English teacher at a middle school in Oxford, enjoying the nine to 13 age group 'little buds of intellectual curiosity are beginning to open up'. Born in 1943, he spent his childhood on various RAF bases, landed an undistinguished degree and drifted into teaching mainly because he liked the long holidays. It only became a vocation when 'I became passionate about transmitting information and enthusiasm, and telling stories.'

Although he'd written and published fiction for both adults and teenagers, it was only when he started freewheeling his way through the Greek myths to fill up the last few minutes of class, and writing the annual school play (a mock penny-dreadful about the Victorian equivalent of Batman), that he got a sense of himself not as a writer, but as a storyteller.

'It came from having children in the audience, which forces you to remember that you're telling a story. You're not there to demonstrate how clever you are or your literary style. Children are only interested in what you're telling them. That was a very valuable lesson.'

I embarrass Pullman by asking about the blissfulness of falling headlong into Lyra's world, a sensation far more common when reading children's books (such as the Narnia books, the theology of which he finds objectionable) than adult fiction. Pullman has had the experience with two books for grown-ups: Persuasion, and, more recently, Lionel Davidson's Kolymsky Heights, a thriller set in Siberia. Oh yes, I say, of course, it happens with thrillers too.

'But you see,' he says, 'genre books and books for children are not very well thought of by literary people. It's as if there's the literary novels and all the rest are fluff under the bed. Since Modernism, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, we suspect stories. We're all clever people now, rather too sophisticated to believe in an omniscient narrator any more.

'There's a sort of embarrassment about telling stories. I've noticed it when talking to adult students of creative writing: this awful self-consciousness comes over them, they believe the narrative technique itself has to be foregrounded, or they run the danger of being mistaken for Jeffrey Archer.

'Once you get over the clever literary tricks, you can get back to proper storytelling. The value of writing books for children is that they couldn't care less if you're Jeffrey Archer or Dostoyevsky. All they want to know is what happens next.'

Last winter's stage version of His Dark Materials is set to return at the National. About A Boy's Chris Weitz has signed up to direct a film version, scripted by Tom Stoppard. All this means that Pullman is finally starting to put together some thoughts about The Book of Dust, the final instalment in what will eventually be the quartet. He won't give much away, but to judge from the clues in Lyra's Oxford, a teaser published last year, there will be a Levantine setting. But it's always a mistake with Pullman to get too hung up on specifics: his geography has little to do with ours.

When he found Lyra, he finally found his storytelling voice. It took him ages to write the first chapter of Northern Lights, but after 16 drafts, he was on safe ground at last. 'I'd never written in that tone before. It was sombre, it was cold, and there was a sense of spaciousness. I much prefer to be the omniscient narrator, which is part of the old fairytale tradition and the 19th-century novel tradition: the thing Modernism got away from. Suddenly I had enormous freedom. I didn't expect that. You see, I'm not a fantasy fan. I'm uneasy to think I write fantasy.'

I wonder what sort of teacher he was. I can imagine him being rather cool and inscrutable: the unreadable authority figure you want to please. Pullman says he was 'inspirational, which wasn't a good thing. I didn't have a plan, I lived from moment to moment. It depended on what was setting me on fire, really. I was impatient. I wasn't really a good teacher.'

It took him a while to work out how to tame a class. 'You mustn't try to be the most popular. That's not your role. The way to control a class is to get the chief girl, or chief boy, interested in what you've got to say. Everyone else will follow them.'

After a few years he begin to notice something. Though every child was different, each class was more or less the same, with roles to be filled. Boys' groups are more casual: the smelly one with nits; the clown, who falls off his chair and gets covered with ink.

'Then there are the girls, who operate on a very different level. There were two sorts of girls' groups in every class. There was the smart, sophisticated caf

A rather offtopic article about role models for the youth, but it has an interesting comment from Philip Pullman.

He may be one of the most ubiquitous sportsmen on the face of the planet, but when it comes to someone to look up to, soccer ace David Beckham has been pipped to the post by rugby star Jonny Wilkinson.

Jonny, who shot into the limelight with his star turn during the rugby world cup in Australia last year, bested several other sporting figures to the role model title in addition to Becks, who came in third.

Former footballer-turned-screen star Vinnie Jones landed sixth place in the Good Housekeeping poll of 16 to 18-year-olds, while boxer Lennox Lewis and Olympic rower Steve Redgrave came in at position four and nine respectively. Other names making the list ranged from anti-landmine campaigner Chris Moon to TV presenter Jonathan Ross.

Trailing just behind hunky sportsman Jonny in second place was wheelchair-bound scientist Stephen Hawking.

A new survey has revealed that for avid book readers nothing is cooler than reading books with the perfect mix of magic and mystery, as the creator of the 'Harry Potter' series, J K Rowling was voted the coolest author ever.

The survey, conducted by the authors of a new book 'Cool Brandleaders,' questioned 3000 people and found that another children's author, Phillip Pullman was the third coolest author, while the mastermind behind the current bestseller 'The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown was the second coolest author, reports the Sun.

Here is a list of the ten coolest authors ever:

1. JK Rowling
2. Dan Brown
3. Philip Pullman
4. Chris Brookmyre
5. Michael Moore
6. Marian Keyes
7. Stephen King
8. Mark Haddon
9. Alice Sebold
10. Iain Banks

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Special thanks to -Aconite- for pointing out this interesting article, written by Philip Pullman.

I don't do science, though I love to read about it. What I do is fiction. They are such different activities that I sometimes wonder whether the same type of mind can do both. I'm not talking about science fiction; it's a respectable genre, with conventions (and Conventions, too), and a canon, and giants and minnows, and classics and trash, but I don't write it and don't much read it. I'm talking about all the rest, about the basic thing that's known as story.

Because stories are fundamentally about individual human beings in human situations. They are the answers to questions such as What will happen when Oedipus meets Jocasta? What is Dorothea going to do when she realises she's made a terrible mistake in marrying that old stick Casaubon? What will Mr Bumble do when Oliver Twist asks for more?

The tensions, expectations and satisfactions we get from fiction are of that sort, and it isn't science, because those aren't scientific questions. A scientific question, I take it, is one like What will happen if I drop two weights at the same moment?

The difference is that once a scientific question is answered, it stays answered - at least, until someone changes the question. What is true for two objects of different weights will also be true, and in the same way, for another two objects of the same weights. There's an abstraction involved: we ignore the fact that this one's painted green, and the other's a bit rusty, and look only at the quality they have in common. Scientific statements are about similar entities behaving in similar ways; what is true for this elementary particle will be true for every other particle of the same kind. In fact, particles such as electrons are so similar that not even their mothers could tell them apart, and as I understand it, there's even a theory that there is only one electron in the universe, but it gets about a lot.

There's no abstract human who will always behave in the same way - except in economics, where every human being is assumed to be rational and selfish to exactly the same degree as every other. No wonder it was called the Dismal Science.

In real life, and in fiction, human beings are much more variable. There's only one Dorothea. However, the variability of fictional human beings involves an odd paradox: the more vividly particular and individual, the more distinct from every other invented character, the more recognisably truthful we think them.

So doing science is not the same as doing fiction. But science as a background to fiction is different. It has to do what all backgrounds do - stand firm and solid. It must not sway alarmingly when someone walks into it or sound hollow when struck, it must conform to the rules of perspective and be vivid enough to convince but not so hectic as to distract.

There's one further thing to say about backgrounds, and it's this: in a story, we are not on oath. We're not taking an exam. The function of research is not to provide me with lots of facts to put into a story unaltered, but to enable me to make up new "facts" that look convincing. The test can only be If I read this, in a book by someone else, would I be taken in? I can't hope to deceive a real expert, but I might deceive the moderately intelligent reader. And if a real expert did read it, I'd hope they might say This man's done a bit of homework.

When it comes to science, it's not hard, these days, to find enough superb writers and fascinating material to satisfy your most demanding interior set-designer. In biology and evolution, there are Richard Dawkins, Steven Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, Jonathan Kingdon, EO Wilson; if it's physics that tickles your fancy, there are David Deutsch, Michio Kaku, Bryan Greene; to find out about cosmology, there are John Gribbin, Martin Rees, Paul Davies. And if you're intrigued by the deepest mystery of the lot, consciousness, you can read Antonio Damasio, and Adam Zeman, and Max Velmans, and VS Ramachandran ... I have read books by all these people, and I haven't even mentioned Roger Penrose.

It isn't hard to find things out. But the best reason to read about science is not to check facts, but to revel in wonder. Part of the impulse behind my longest story lay in the extraordinary poetry of the phrase "dark matter", and my discovery that Milton had anticipated it in Paradise Lost:

Unless the Almighty Maker them ordained His dark materials to create new worlds

When you come to write the story, you mustn't lose that first impulse of wonder. Science and fiction deal with different entities, and ask different questions; but each can intoxicate, inspire, console, and feed that appetite for mystery and revelation that makes human beings at least as interesting as electrons.

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The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, which has earned millions of pounds in royalties from the copyright of Peter Pan, is to commission a sequel to J M Barrie's beloved masterpiece.

The hospital announced a nationwide competition yesterday to find an author worthy of the job.

The country's leading publishers and literary agents will be approached to each nominate two writers, who will be asked to submit a synopsis and sample chapter by Jan 31 next year.

Andrew Fane, chairman of the special trustees of the hospital's children's charity, who supervise Barrie's copyright, said: "The hospital would be very happy to attract very, very talented writers like J K Rowling or Philip Pullman because clearly that would give the sequel a high profile.

I would be very pleasantly surprised if that happened but wouldn't it also be wonderful if we discovered a marvellous writer who is slightly less well known?"

Copyright on Barrie's original novel runs out in Britain and Europe in 2007 and earnings from a sequel will continue to boost hospital funds.

The approved sequel will also, the hospital hopes, deter unauthorised attempts to cash in on the Land of Everlasting Youth.

Last year, the hospital became involved in a costly battle in California to suppress a revisionist updating of the story in which Peter Pan grows up into happy adulthood. The special trustees have set out strict guidelines for their sequel.

It should include all the original central characters - Peter and Wendy, the Darling family, Tinkerbell, The Lost Boys and Captain Hook.

The trustees say that both the setting and the characters can be contemporary - so, for example, Captain Hook could be a modern-day villain - but the sequel should reflect the heart of the original book and be "magical".

Peter Pan was written by Sir James Barrie as a play 100 years ago, and did not appear as a novel until 1911.

The author, a long-time supporter of the hospital, gave it the Peter Pan copyright in 1929, eight years before his death. He stipulated that the hospital should never disclose its earnings from the book. Mr Fane said yesterday that Peter Pan royalties ran "into the millions" but he would not be more specific.

The hospital is heavily reliant on private funds - a new wing currently being built at a cost of

Great Ormond Street bids to cash in on Barrie's copyright legacy

The three leading storytellers in Britain's current golden age of children's fiction are expected to balk at a challenge made to them today - to embark on the "awfully big adventure" of writing a sequel to Peter Pan which proves as long-lived as the original.

The invitation comes from Great Ormond Street children's hospital in London, to which JM Barrie left the lucrative copyright of his stage play.

To mark its centenary in December - and to help it continue to buy state of the art technology to treat its acutely ill children - the hospital trustees are launching a search for "a magical sequel to JM Barrie's timeless masterpiece".

The trustees aim to commission a new story which will "share the same enchanting characters as the original, the same longevity, and be just as valid in a hundred years as the original is today". They are eager for one or more of today's leading children's writers to enter for the project.

"There are some brilliant authors around at the moment," Jane Collins, the hospital's chief executive, said yesterday, "I don't know if they will agree to try or not. I have no reason to think that they will. But, gosh, it would be fantastic if they did."

Yesterday the first reaction from two of the three most popular writers, Philip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson, was to make clear to the Guardian that they would decline.

However, they said they wished the hospital well.

JK Rowling, creator of Harry Potter, is on holiday and "too busy writing to comment", her spokesman said. She is committed to finishing the Potter series.

But other English-language writers - of any nationality - can hope for a degree of cash and prestige if they accept Great Ormond Street's financial terms, keep to its brisk timetable and win the commission.

But some modern authors would shun the competition because they see Barrie's story as embodying an unrealistic and unhealthy view of childhood and a pathological resistance to growing up.

The hospital would hold copyright, including crucial film rights, in the sequel, but would split publisher's royalties with the author. Its lawyers said the author "could reasonably expect to participate in the exploitation of film rights".

Publishers and literary agents are invited to nominate up to two authors each to the trustees. Nominated writers must send a short synopsis and sample chapter by January 31 to a panel of judges headed by the film producer Lord Puttnam.

The winner will be chosen next spring. The hospital wants the book published next autumn.

Jacqueline Wilson, the queen of marathon bookshop signings, said: "Peter Pan almost lends itself to the idea of a sequel because in some versions of the play Wendy's daughter goes off to Wonder land to have adventures with Peter Pan. And so I think many writers could have fun with this theme but I think we'll count me out."

Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials trilogy was voted third most favourite story in last year's BBC Big Read poll, said: "I wish Great Ormond Street very well, but I can't help feeling that they've got the process the wrong way round.

"It wasn't Great Ormond Street that thought up Peter Pan in the first place, and then went to Barrie and commissioned him to write the play. It was Barrie who wrote it, out of the pressures and fascinations and obsessions that attend any literary inspiration, and then gave it to them.

"That's the only way literary masterpieces come into being. I just can't see how the process could work the other way round."

In 1988, parliament gave Great Ormond Street what amounts to perpetual copyright in UK revenues from the stage play first performed in 1904. But the hospital is planning ahead to the expiry in 2023 of the US copyright, which generates its film revenue.

At least 10 film or television versions of the play - some of them sequels - have been screened since Barrie, who had no children, bequeathed the copyright in 1929. These include Disney's cartoon (1953), Spielberg's Hook (1991) and Disney's Return to Neverland (2002).

Barrie's will forbade the hospital to give figures for its copyright income. But this is known to rise spectacularly from films, and "vary considerably" at other times.

"It helps us buy the most up to date state-of-the-art equipment to diagnose and treat the children we see," Jane Collins said. "We care for some of the sickest, most complex children in the country. We need to ensure they have the best treatment.

"Parents come here desperate about their children. We use the money to support the families who come, sometimes for long periods. We use it for extra psycho-social support".

Recently Peter Pan income had bought new CT and MRI scanners but "increasingly the revenue stream is lessening over time. It's interesting why we have not done this [commissioning a sequel] sooner. We have the enthusiasm to do it now."

In his novel, Peter Pan and Wendy, published in 1911, seven years after the stage play, Barrie wrote his own mini-sequel. In his final chapter, Peter Pan takes each generation of Wendy's girl descendants to Neverland but he forgets them as soon as they grow up and cease to be children.

Ms Collins said: "It is a hard act to follow. But I am sure we have writers who could manage it."

Barrie's sequel

When Wendy returned, she found Peter sitting on the bedpost crowing gloriously, while [Wendy's daughter] Jane in her nighty was flying round the room.

"She is my mother," Peter explained; and Jane descended. "He does so need a mother," Jane said. "Yes, I know," Wendy admitted; "no one knows it so well as I." "Goodbye," said Peter to Wendy; and he rose in the air, and the shameless Jane rose with him; it was already her easiest way of moving about. "If only I could go with you," Wendy sighed. "You see you can't fly," said Jane.

Of course in the end Wendy let them fly away together. Our last glimpse of her shows her at the window, watching them receding into the sky until they were as small as stars.

As you look at Wendy you may see her hair becoming white, and her figure little again, for all this happened long ago. Jane is now a common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret; and every spring-cleaning time, except when he forgets, Peter comes for Margaret and takes her to the Neverland, where she tells him stories about himself, to which he listens eagerly. When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter's mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are innocent.

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In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, it is where the boat dwelling "Gyptians" live and work, and where the heroine, Lyra, is rescued.

But in real life, the historic Alchemy boatyard in Oxford, which has been repairing canal barges for almost 160 years, is under threat from a plan to build 47 luxury flats which would earn up to

"We don't need or want Jericho to become a museum," he told the Guardian. "But nor should it be a machine for making money. There are some developments that not even a ghost could bear to live in."

In a few months' time, John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, will have to decide whether to keep the boatyard alive or give the green light to the development plans, which have been rejected twice by the city council and for years by the local community.

Mr Pullman's opposition centres on the unquantifiable damage he believes may be done to the culture of the Jericho area, Oxford's first planned suburb and a place where artisans lived and worked.

The author, who lives outside Oxford, drew heavily on the atmosphere of the boatyard and the canal boat dwellers for several sections of his books, which have sold more than 2.5m copies.

The real-life boatyard is a messy, noisy, rundown work ing area, with people repairing and renovating up to 20 narrow boats at any one time. One of the last unmodernised areas of central Oxford, it is also a centre for a large community of people who live on boats.

The plans, by Bellway Homes, involve four-storey apartment blocks, a piazza and a restaurant. "Jericho is all two-up, two-down workers' cottages," said Mark Davies, a local canal historian.

"The scheme would have a major impact on the area. The boatyard has been allowed to run down because British Waterways will only give very short leases on it. But they are charged with protecting the heritage."

Steven Goodlad, who runs the yard, said: "It's one of the oldest canals in Britain, and there's been work done on this site I reckon for almost 150 years. We service about 70 boats. If it goes then there is a real danger that the boats on the canal will deteriorate and become unsafe."

Meanwhile, a community group is hoping that a smaller boatyard could be kept and the rest of the site developed for modern artisans, who have next to no space in central Oxford for workshops.

A spokeswoman for British Waterways said: "We are contracted to Bellway Homes and the developer has agreed to buy the site off us subject to planning permission. This is now going to appeal. I think the development will blend in very well."

She added: "The public will have better use of the canal. Every pound we make from the development is a pound which will go back into renovating the canal system. We are actively looking for another location for the boatyard."

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PHILIP Pullman is widely regarded as the thinking man

He now joins the Generation Science Club, which brings together Scotland

AWARD-WINNING children

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Philip Pullman is to open an exhibition of twelve William Blake's paintings. William Blake, illustrator of the original Paradise Lost and writer of his own version, had a heretical view of God. Humans were close to being holy innocents and were anatomically perfect; Satan was near to being a true god.

The exhibition is being opened by Philip Pullman, whose bestselling trilogy, His Dark Materials, owes much to Blake and Milton.

Twelve paintings displaying the poet William Blake's highly personal view of God, the flesh and the devil will be seen in Britain today for the first time for nearly a century.

The early 19th-century artist and visionary was glad to get

This is an opinion piece about Prospect Magazine's Top 100 Intellectuals List (Britain.) Philip Pullman has been bestowed with the honor of being named as one of these intellectuals. For more information on this, please click here.

OH NO, not another list. Those top hundred league tables of the rich and famous have become so familiar that it is hard to remember life without them.

This one, however, is different. Prospect Magazine has listed Britain

Now, even defining an intellectual these days is tough enough, and the whole point of a list like this is to quarrel with it. Prospect suggests its own definition: someone who has achieved distinction in his or her field, who explores original ideas, and has the ability to communicate them to a wider public.

The bigger question is whether we think intellectuals have any significant role to play in public life today, and whether they influence society. This is not a country with a strong intellectual tradition. Unlike France, Britain has preferred men of action, pragmatists, doers rather than thinkers. These days, we tend to worship celebrities, not scholars, people who can communicate with the widest possible audience rather than those exploring esoteric ideas, however vital.

This is particularly disappointing in Scotland, where once intellectual and public life were synonymous. Looking back, we can list men and women who not only played key roles in changing the way we thought and behaved, but were very much embedded in the society of which they were part. The philosopher David Hume, the geologist James Hutton, the economist Adam Smith, were far from being ivory tower academics, they were wholly involved in Scottish life. Elsie Inglis not only wrote about social reform, she played a direct role in improving the living conditions of ordinary people. Naomi Mitchison was more than just a novelist and a serious intellectual, her commitment to Scotland was total.

Can we say the same today? With the birth of devolution there was much talk about the way political change might usher in a wave of new ideas. We do not debate the kind of ideas that might mould our society Think tanks were created, a cultural strategy drawn up, there were more conferences and seminars than you could shake a thesis at. But how much did all this impact on Scottish life and thinking? Who are the great Scots intellectuals of our day and how much influence do they have?

There is not much encouragement to be found in the Prospect list. This is a very metropolitan crowd. The handful of Scottish names - Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Tom Nairn, the writer, the above-named Niall Ferguson, Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum - have made their reputations furth of Scotland rather than at home. Others based here - Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the composer, Bernard Crick, the political theorist, Charles Jencks, creator of the Landform garden at the Gallery of Modern Art - are not immediately familiar to the average Scot.

But this is not intended as a Scottish whinge. It is inevitable that, post-devolution, we should be caught up in our own agenda, of which London knows little. That does not mean the ideas or those exploring them are less important. It is a fact of life that someone writing or broadcasting in London will be noticed by the UK media in a way that someone pursuing equally interesting ideas in Edinburgh, Dundee or Glasgow will not. There is another twist - if those ideas involve national identity or philosophy, they will have an impact in Scotland, but not necessarily elsewhere. That does not make them less worthwhile.

My own list would include: Edwin Morgan, our national bard, a brilliant and humane thinker; Alasdair Gray, whose novel Lanark is a post-war icon; Ian Wilmut, creator of Dolly the Sheep, now expanding the genetic horizons yet further; Professor Peter Higgs, physicist, who gave his name to the Higgs-Boson Particle, the most original scientific theory of our time; Richard Holloway, exploring the problems of faith in the modern age; Allan Massie, author and critic; Professor Christopher Smout, Historiographer Royal; Tom Devine, historian, who has redefined Scotland

AWARD-WINNING authors are running free writing classes after a mix-up over grants.

Toe Newydd, the National Writers' Centre for Wales, should have been full of builders this summer. Instead, some of Britain's finest writers such as Philip Pullman - who grew up in North Wales - will be working there for nothing, and donating their fees to help pay for improvements.

The

Toe Newydd, in Llanystumdwy, near Criccieth, has to find match-funding but a mix-up surrounding Objective 1 and the Local Regeneration Fund leaves it

Two women are turning an old warehouse on a tributary of the River Tyne into a home for children's literary classics.

Further south, the great and the good of Oxford have woken up to the fact that their city was and is home to some of the greatest children's heroes of all time and are planning to celebrate Alice and the White Rabbit, Lyra and Will, and the hidden land of Narnia.

And in Great Missenden, not far from Oxford, a museum housing the prolific archive of Roald Dahl, creator of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "James and the Giant Peach", will open next spring.

"We had this increasing feeling that Britain was world class in children's literature yet the original manuscripts were going abroad," said Mary Briggs, co-founder of the Centre for the Children's Book in Newcastle.

"We decided it really was time to do something about it."

Briggs and business partner Elizabeth Hammill, who used to work for booksellers Waterstones, started work in 1996 with 10 pounds in the bank.

"Looking back I think we might have been mad," Briggs told Reuters.

Since then they have raised more than six million pounds and chalked up some major collecting coups. Their first success was buying the Kaye Webb collection.

"The gods were on our side," Briggs said. "We got a lot of publicity. She's a seminal figure in publishing. The archive contains letters between her and Roald Dahl, and anybody who was anybody in that world in the 1960s and 1970s."

Philip Pullman, whose award-winning trilogy "His Dark Materials" has been called the thinking child's Harry Potter, has donated manuscripts of earlier books, with more to follow, she said.

The centre, which will open next year, also possesses original illustrations from Noel Streatfield's "Ballet Shoes," while many contemporary writers, including Shirley Hughes, Joan Aiken and Michael Rosen, have promised original work.

"We are a bit hung up on our concept of what heritage is. But we're beginning to face up to the fact that we can't wait until something is antique and gathering dust -- by then it'll be too late," said the centre's collection manager, Sarah Lawrance.

University city Oxford has long been established as a doorway into other worlds. Lewis Carroll, author of "Alice in Wonderland" worked in Christ Church College. Hobbit-creator J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the man who dreamt up Narnia, used to drink together in Oxford pubs.

And Philip Pullman's fictional young lovers, Will and Lyra, meet every year on a bench in the Oxford Botanical Gardens, side-by-side but stranded in different worlds.

"It is quite remarkable that Oxford has proved to be an incubator for some of the finest pieces of children's literature," Museum of Oxford curator John Lange said.

Now plans are afoot to create a one-stop shop to pay tribute to Oxford's literary heroes and heroines.

The museum, the university, local government and the publishing industry are banding together and hope to found a centre before the decade is out, Lange said.

"When I got into it I felt there was a real need to keep this material in the country," he added.

The Dahl family have also been very keen to keep his archive intact, said Amanda Conquy, who looks after the literary estate.

"He hand-wrote every book and every draft. His mother kept all his letters and he kept all hers. It's a tremendous conversation, the whole of which is preserved on paper," she said.

The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre will house his work, run exhibitions and allow children (and adults) to see how his tales developed.

"In the first draft of 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' Charlie was a black boy. It was really the American publishers who influenced the change, we think," Conquy said.

Dahl died in 1990 but his books continue to sell over one million copies in Britain every year.

"He loved England and wanted his work to stay here. He thought there was something rather distasteful about big bucks buying writers' work."

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Philip Pullman
Author of the trilogy His Dark Materials.

She was responsible for a huge and devastating mistake, which was to allow the market imperative to invade areas where it had no business to be and where it was a malign influence. For instance, it became OK to sneer at teachers because they didn't earn very much money, and the individual in a private car was given far greater importance than public transport.

She introduced a kind of moral anarchy. Qualities such as courtesy and tolerance and civic decency were somehow made to appear old-fashioned and unnecessary.

So, today, we have a public life of profound vulgarity, a morally squalid press and a political class and Parliament of the lowest quality in my lifetime. These are all things that she licensed and encouraged. She gave us an almost lethal dose of moral poison - it might still prove to be lethal - so that being British is no longer something to celebrate.

She hijacked the Conservative Party, which was supposed to conserve good things and good values, and substituted the values of a 19th-century free-market liberal whose only interest was in making money, using any means within the law - and if the law got in the way, change the law.

At least, she did something to curb the irresponsible power of the unions - but apart from that, I haven't got a good word for the woman.

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