Philip Pullman’s novel The Scarecrow and the Servant, to be published by Doubleday in the autumn, sounds like Don Quixote for eight-year-olds and above, in the same vein as the wonderful i Was a Rat! in which Cinders’s footman tells his story and ends up at the mercy of the media’s own rat pack. There are tickets left for the first stage production of i Was a Rat!, performed by the Junior Oxford Youth Theatre Group at Oxford’s Pegasus Theatre, and finishing tomorrow. Tel: 01865 722851. Education packs available on 01865 792209; more resources at www.edstud.

ox.ac.ukpgceenglish.html.