The best children’s books: a Spectator Christmas survey

J.K. Rowling

Poignant, funny and genuinely scary, The Hundred and One Dalmatians was one of my favourite books as a child and the story has lingered in my imagination ever since. Blue iced cakes always put me in mind of Cruella de Vil’s experimental food colourings, and whenever our dogs whine to get out at dusk I imagine them joining the canine news network, the twilight barking. There’s simply no resisting a book containing the lines ‘There are some people who always find beauty makes them feel sadder, which is a very mysterious thing’, and ‘Mr Dearly was a highly skilled dog-puncher’.

Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall

There are countless children’s books that I loved, so it is a close-run thing, but on reflection my favourite has to be Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. I loved it as a pony-mad child and now, in my dotage, I still cry over the death of poor Ginger. I still have my childhood copy — very battered these days and with a smell that takes me straight back to my earliest years, when my father would read it to me. Even now, I continue to discover in it elements that I missed when I was small: the paean to the beauties of Norfolk; the cleverly constructed relationship between people, animals and nature; the author’s concern over our weakening connection to the countryside; the extraordinary understanding of equine and human psychology. For me, Black Beauty proves the truth of C.S. Lewis’s famous quote: ‘No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally — and often far more — worth reading at the age of 50 and beyond.’ 

Jacqueline Wilson

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild was the first book I bought myself with my pocket money. I loved the cover of this early Puffin paperback, a beautiful green, my favourite colour, with an illustration of the three adopted Fossil sisters in white tutus, dancing in their pink ballet shoes.