"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 rea...
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Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
I can think of few writers who have put on paper as successfully as Robert Westall has done in The Machine-Gunners the sheer muddle of [the Second World War] and the ...
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Critical Essay by Robert Bell
The cunning, initiative and courage which [the boys in The Machine Gunners] show in carrying out their plan under the noses of the adults, as well as those of a suspicio...
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Critical Essay by Aidan Chambers
[The Machine Gunners is] astonishingly good. (p. 438)
[Gripping] though the events are, it is not so much what but the way and why it happens that is important in ...
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Critical Essay by Betty Baum
The horrid, sordid aspects of the war are depicted [in The Machine Gunners] without sentimentality or sensationalism. Both children and adults are believable and the plot...
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Critical Essay by Ralph Lavender
The Watch House, set in the Robert Westall country of The Machine-Gunners, concerns Anne, who has been dumped like a lost parcel on Prudie, her mother's old na...
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Critical Essay by Robert Westall
Ever since I wrote The Machine-gunners (and in spite of the fact that my last three books have been fantasies) people keep consulting me about realism in children�...
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Damage to a turret and windshield of a Marine Humvee is evidence that someone fired at the vehicle in March when as many as 19 Afghanistan civilians were killed, an Army explosives expert testified...
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Robert Westall
Critical Essay by Margery Fisher
Expert says Marine vehicle fired upon
