Читать книгу We’re British, Innit: An Irreverent A to Z of All Things British - Iain Aitch - Страница 19

With hundreds of books written and hundreds of millions sold, Enid Blyton is probably Britain’s best loved and most read author. Her writing may be considered dated and restricted, as well as occasionally racist and sexist, but you can be sure that more Britons have read her work for pleasure than have ever opened up those leather- bound Complete Works of Shakespeare (see shakespeare, william) that languish on so many shelves. The Noddy stories are still extremely popular in book form and on television (though now stripped of the golliwogs), but it is the Famous Five and Secret Seven series that are the archetypal Blyton books that we Brits have a fondness for. These promise adventure, secret hideaways, idyllic childhoods, swarthy strangers and lashings of ginger beer once the mystery is solved. Blyton claimed to have written entirely from her imagination, though if you consider the bizarrely fantastical content of some of her fantasy stories like Folk of the Faraway Tree alongside the fact that she wrote as many as 10,000 words per day then you could be forgiven for wondering what the hell she was putting in her tea.