Dinah Birch

In June​ 1934, Richmal Crompton published ‘William and the Nasties’ in the Happy Magazine, an interwar journal that provided readers with a cheerful stream of popular fiction. In this story, William Brown, 11-year-old leader of the Outlaws, decides to become a Nazi. Despite his interest in ‘rightin’ people’s wrongs’, he has been impressed by his friend...

‘We never say what we mean, and you’ll never know what we’re thinking. And by the time you work it out, someone is murdering you with a bow and arrow at an antique fair. That’s just how we are I’m afraid.’ This is an arch piece of marketing from Richard Osman, promoting his detective novels to an American readership. There’s no reason to suppose that...

‘Aren’t you tired​ of them? One hears nothing else nowadays.’ The peevish Mrs Snowdon, a character in Mary Louisa Molesworth’s ‘The Story of the Rippling Train’ (1887), is grumbling about the popularity of ghost stories. Nevertheless, she is gripped by the one that follows. Accounts of the supernatural proliferated in the 19th century, as the certainties...

Years ago​, a poison pen letter dropped onto my doormat. It was a rambling affair in uneven capitals, accusing me of all sorts of lurid wickedness. As no threats were involved and the allegations were evidently crazy, I put it straight in the bin and tried to forget about it. But I was unsettled. Who had written it? How had they found my address? Why me? Was worse to follow? Nothing else...

In the early 1980s​, before hitch-hikers disappeared from the roads, I gave a lift to a couple of teenage Goths on the way to Stratford-upon-Avon. Their cheerful conversation was reassuringly at odds with their get-up (black hair, white faces, silver skulls dangling from their ears). I wondered whether they might see a connection between Hamlet’s nighted colour and their own style,...