It used to be that children’s books were filled with niceness. It’s different now: “With the exception of fantasy, most books for older children eagerly embrace ‘unsuitable’ subjects: mental illness, poverty, crime, sex and drugs. Perhaps childhood is disappearing. When most information, as well as entertainment, came from the printed word, it was possible to isolate what children read from the fare on offer for adults. This came to mean the sheltering of children from adult secrets, particularly sexual secrets. The growth of radio, television and the internet obviously means that this isolation is now at an end; all children now have access to information that would have been automatically denied them as little as 20 years ago.”