Leon Garfield Summary

Described by John Rowe Townsend as "the richest and strangest" talent to emerge in British children's writing in the 1960s, Leon Garfield writes books that are simultaneously traditional and distincti... Read more

Critical Essay by Margaret Sherwood Libby Jack Holborn [is] a taut, tough and exciting story, complicated but so well-told that it held me to the last page. The old cliches [about pirate tales] are g... Read more

Critical Essay by Sheila Egoff The rising star in [the field of the British historical novel] is Leon Garfield, who has called forth comparions with Fielding, Hogarth, and Dickens. Not merely concern... Read more

Critical Essay by Ted Hughes There have been many retellings of Greek myths for children but this interweaving of about twenty of them [in The God Beneath the Sea] must be among the best. It is diffi... Read more

Critical Essay by Clive Pemberton There is a type of book which operates both on an adult and a juvenile level. I am not thinking of books like Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver's Travels, which pro... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Camp Karl Kraus said: "There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body;... Read more

Critical Essay by Peter Geoffrey Townsend In an Afterword the co-authors [of The God Beneath the Sea] explain that their aim in re-telling the Greek myths to the young is to avoid 'A haphazard... Read more

Critical Essay by Margery Fisher What is a children's book? What is a young adult? What pigeon-hole is big enough for Garfield? The answers to these questions must depend finally on each reade... Read more

Critical Essay by John Rowe Townsend Of all the talents that emerged in the field of British writing for children in the 1960s, that of Leon Garfield seems to me to be the richest and strangest. I am... Read more

Critical Essay by Brian W. Alderson It is Bostock and Harris who are responsible for 'the affair' [in The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris], they (or at least Harris) having decided to... Read more

Critical Essay by J. Allan Morrison [Sir John Theophilus Lee is portrayed in Child O'War] as an ingratiating nonentity…. His one substantial claim on the regard of posterity, apart from... Read more

Critical Essay by Margery Fisher The ghost downstairs tantalises with fleeting likenesses—among them Bosch and Breughel, Coleridge and M. R. James; the last not only because "a ghost in... Read more

Critical Essay by Jean C. Thomson If readers of Stevenson delighted in "Jack Holborn," Garfield's first book, "Devil-in-the-Fog" will suit devotees of Dickens. Such... Read more

Critical Essay by Myles Mcdowell What is one to say … of the view of life expressed in, for example, Smith, by Leon Garfield: is that simplistic? The word hardly seems an apt description for a... Read more

Critical Essay by Judith Vidal-hall [The Golden Shadow] is in no way a conventional retelling of the deeds of a strong-arm bully whose heroism is measured in monsters slain and enemies lying dead in ... Read more

Critical Essay by C. S. Hannabuss The richly styled atmospherics of Leon Garfield form one of the salient literary features in the landscape of the last decade and a half of children's books&#... Read more

Critical Essay by C. E. J. Smith [The Prisoners of September is a] real reader's book. The plot is as nicely convoluted and ironically involved as one has come to expect; the characters have a... Read more

Critical Essay by Gordon Parsons Leon Garfield has said that we are all the ghosts of what we were. Unfortunately, if we are to afford Garfield the level of critical response his remarkable achieveme... Read more

Critical Essay by Russell Hoban Leon Garfield is an example of what talent can do to a children's book writer: it can drive him out of children's books as he follows the development of ... Read more

Critical Essay by Margery Fisher "Garfield's Apprentices" opens with two stories—Mirror, Mirror and The Lamplighter's Funeral—which offer examples of cruelty... Read more

Critical Essay by Paul Langford [The House of Hanover] takes the form of a stroll through the Hanoverian portions of the National Portrait Gallery, with a running commentary on the principal personal... Read more

Critical Essay by C. S. Hannabuss The Lamplighter's Funeral and Mirror, Mirror [are] … very much in the style of books like The Ghost Downstairs and Black Jack. The misanthropic lamplig... Read more

Critical Essay by Julia Briggs Leon Garfield [presents] his simple people simply as they are [in Moss and Blister], in a comic view that surprisingly avoids being patronizing while delighting in absu... Read more

Critical Essay by Naomi Lewis Smith crosses the line into brilliance. Smith himself [is] a pickpocket by trade…. After he has taken—something—from a troubled-looking old gentl... Read more

Critical Essay by Philip Holland Garfield's novels appeal to young readers for reasons which should become clear in looking at them individually. All his work has a strong narrative line and h... Read more

Critical Essay by Roni Natov Leon Garfield has been hailed as one of the best contemporary writers for adolescents for his lively and unmistakable style, his ability to weave a series of endlessly fa... Read more

Critical Essay by Margery Fisher Smith is an outstanding book on many counts. Set in the author's favoured period, the mid-eighteenth century, the story owes its unerring sense of period partl... Read more

Critical Essay by Virginia Haviland [Black Jack is another] graphic eighteenth-century story from this master of prose [which] suggests his earlier macabre situations and characters, but also possess... Read more