"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 y...

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 Friday.Divots on the windshield, holes in a headlight and a nick...

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's books. Rather as if I'd been appointed high priest and was being asked to read the entrails. There is not much career-structure for high priests who fail to read entrails, so I'd better come clean with what I think. (p. 34) Perhaps all the best books start by being written for only one child, and that child very close to you...

[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 this book. (p. 439)

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 nanny…. She becomes interested in the Watch House …, where there is a museum. The past begins to catch up with the present when Anne goes to dust the display cases there, and through her two unsettled ghosts begin to work towards their final emnity against each other…. It is a fast-moving, action-packed story written in a rac...