RECRUITMENT British-trained nannies have a good reputation and can command decent salaries. By Caroline Roberts Job prospects for nannies have never been better. It's no longer just the twinset-and-pearls types living in the country and driving a Range Rover who employ them,...

George was 18 months old when Lucy and Martin Lansdowne adopted him. They knew it was an act of faith. The couple, who already had two adopted children, had seen him advertised and heard that his mother had not wanted him, had scarcely touched...

At the heart of Christina Stead's fiction echoes the persistent moral issue: egotism. She sees everyone striving by subtle or overt manipulations to subordinate others to his or her own needs and desires, trying to take as much while giving as little as possible. In her 1940 masterpiece, The Man Who Loved Children, Stead criticizes this ongoing struggle between competing egotisms, not only in her characterization and analysis, but in the very form of her fiction. This novel takes as protagonist no si...

[In The Man Who Loved Children] Christina Stead has created what is extremely rare in modern literature: three archetypal characters who have a life of their own, independent of their author; characters like Dickens's Uriah Heep or Mr Micawber, who can be known to those who have never read the books in which they figure. This is particularly true of Sam Pollit, 'the man who loved children'. The ironical title defines him as the phrase 'humble as Uriah Heep' defines Heep. F...

[Christina Stead] appeals through the oddness of her characters and the relentless, uniquely resourceful dialogue through which she creates them. But the very amplitude of her portraits demands a significance she finds difficult to establish. The baby-talking egoist Sam Pollit [in The Man Who Loved Children] never comes to represent colonial condescension, though Stead hints at the connection, just as Nellie Cotter, in last year's Dark Places of the Heart, never quite distills the cant of England�...