there's a new film out about the life of Beatrix Potter in case you didn't know. My relatives bought me Beatrix Potter books when I was a kid and I always thought they were incredibly dull and uninteresting. I think they fall into that category of nice respectable and exceptionally insipid lifestyle accessories which genteel middle class folk buy for their kids, and never stop to think if they'll be appreciated - or if they're actually any good. (I remember playing at a friends house as a kid and he had lots of handmade toys - wooden bricks and hand puppets etc, beautifully made but all completely unstimulating and uninteresting and yet the parents treated them like holy relics and went out of their way to tell everyone of their very tasteful provenance).
- "So far, my daughter and I have found Beatrix Potter to be a proselytiser for sadistic punishment, a sartorial fascist, a property-upholding reactionary, an obsessive-compulsive nutcase... and, conceivably, a bystander in the face of an intolerable natural dystopia that, with her sick (though gifted) writer's mind, she culpably imagined."
