"Perhaps all the best books," wrote Robert Westall in Signal, "start by being written for only one child, and that child very close to you. They start when the child-within-the-author turns to the real child and says, 'Come away with me and I will show...

There are always problems with time travels which involve real histories, and The Devil on the Road does not escape them, though Westall handles the transitions with great subtlety and skill. But the writing is so charged and vigorous, the timing of the plot so carefully measured, that the customary difficulties are minimized. John Webster seems very real indeed, and likable; and even better, there is a young cat, deeply involved in the story and central to it, who is surely one of the best and most charmin...

Set in both today's England and Civil War England, [The Devil on the Road] describes the experiences of John Webster in each time period. The author attempts to develop the main character and to set the basis for the novel before he allows Webster to traipse back and forth in time. The results are useless…. What sustains the story is a fictionalized account of a witch hunt in Cromwell's England. Transported back to that era, Webster finds himself forced to decide whether to accept passi...

At a first reading I felt that the historical sources for The Devil on the Road were too obtrusive in the narrative, but a second reading made the careful structure of the book and the skilful correlations of past with present a good deal more apparent. The infamous Witch-Finder General of the 1640's, Matthew Hopkins, and the sadistic false witness and greed he showed towards helpless victims in Suffolk, provide the basis for the story of a first-year student at London University who … is caug...