Eleanor & Alasdair Read That

She's small. She's ginger. She's very hard to get out of your house. No, not Eleanor Morton. We're talking about Arietty Clock, the tiny teenage protagonist of Mary Norton's 1952 novel The Borrowers. The Borrowers are a diminutive people who love stealing almost as much as they love the British class system.

But has this tale of curtain-climbing social climbers aged well? Find out in Series 2 of Eleanor & Alasdair Read That.

Bu...

The stone table cracks and Eleanor & Alasdair return to Narnia. It's time to pass judgement on The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe. Eleanor sings the praises of the dodgy beaver costumes in the 1988 BBC adaptation and Alasdair gets annoyed about a stupid kids' film for babies. But is C. S. Lewis's book a Turkish Delight? Or is it a Turkish Delight (derogatory)?

We recommend you go back and listen to Part 1 before this episod...

Always-winter-but-never-Christmas starts earlier every year, doesn't it? Eleanor and Alasdair read C. S. Lewis's furniture-based children's classic The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe (1950). And we've split this bumper Yuletide edition of the pod in two.

In Part 1, we recount the story of Lucy's adventures in Narnia, in what a cynical person might call too much detail. We enjoy a platonic hot-tub with Santa. And, for some reaso...

A boarding school for witches? Imagine that! No, not Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Bigotry. We're talking about Miss Cackle's Academy, from Jill Murphy's 1974 bestseller The Worst Witch. In this episode, Alasdair discovers the ropey TV Movie from 1986 and Eleanor learns that it's possible to identify with Mildred Hubble a bit too much.

Will the Worst Witch make the grade? Can we avoid talking about Harry Bloody Potter? And did ...

The Railway Children is an Edwardian children's classic and health & safety nightmare. Edith "E" Nesbit's novel is packed with unforgettable characters, railway mishaps and an exiled Russian dissident who no one remembers. In this episode, recorded live at the Edinburgh Fringe, we learn that trespassing on a train line is OK, as long as you're a middle-class child.

Will the book withstand the edgy, late-night comedy of Eleanor ...

Eleanor and Alasdair read The Story of Tracy Beaker. Jacqueline Wilson's 1991 hit has spawned numerous sequels and TV spin-offs, but Alasdair has missed out on all of them due to being a boy and man, in that order. The protagonist and narrator, Tracy Beaker, is an irrepressible kid in a care home and “the Millennial Holden Caulfield” (according to Eleanor).

Will Eleanor's childhood nostalgia survive re-reading the book? Will Alasda...

We're all mad here. Specifically, Eleanor is mad about people saying Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on drugs and Alasdair is mad about the Tim Burton film being rubbish. For this episode, we read Carroll's enormously influential 1865 novel, and we asked: do books actually need plots? Or will some 160 year-old puns do?

Content Warning: We make allusions to the controversy surrounding Carroll, without going into...

Sickly, spoiled and terrified of the outside world, Eleanor and Alasdair read The Secret Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett's kidlit classic is the story of an obnoxious little girl who goes to Yorkshire on her gap year and really finds herself. Is the book an ode to the healing powers of nature? Or is it a hippy-fascist self-help tract? And which film adaptation is best — the one Eleanor watched as a kid, or the steampunk Mormon vers...

Eleanor and Alasdair read a Roald Dahl book about some absolutely horrid women. "Which one?" you quite reasonably ask. It's The Witches: a grotesquely funny revenge caper fuelled by 'stranger danger' anxiety. What do you do when a beloved children's author is a bit of a bigot? Which of Dahl's books scandalised nine-year-old Eleanor's schoolteacher? And exactly what accent was Anne Hathaway doing in the movie? Listen, and find out i...