Who should walk up to the master after supper that evening and ask for more? And it fell to Oliver Twist." Do you want some more? Well, if you do, go pick up a copy and get reading.

Hello, everyone.

Philip Pullman here, and I want to tell you about one of the best things I've ever read.

The book is-- Well, it's in several books because it's a ballad, an anonymous ballad from the Middle Ages, and it's by, well, Anonymous, that great writer who wrote so many wonderful things.

I love this book, and any book of ballads, because the stories are so good.

It's not just that they're poems, and they are wonderful poems, but the, the stories show such art and such clever storytelling that I always wonder every time I read it, um, why no one has stolen these stories and made them into a book.

So I'd like to read a little extract from it and give you a taste of this beautiful poem.

Happy Book Week Radio 2, and happy reading, everyone.

Her three great loves sort of serve her at different points of her life.

Well, they are very different.

Her relationship with Pan is deeper than love.

It's being.

They are the same being.

And although they can be estranged, it's never a complete separation.

He's always there and he will always be there and they will always be together.

So how important do you think storytelling is just in our lives? day-to-day lives and the way that we speak to each other

Mm.

He let the story itself tell us.

He let the poetry itself work its magic on us, and we were, we were, um, bewitched.

It was quite extraordinary.

Um, so that's...

I, I, I remembered that later on when I was a teacher, and as often as I could, I let the poetry make work its own magic and didn't bother load them down with explanations for what it meant before I got there.

Um, so that was an example of how young I was when I was thinking about stories.

Mm.

What were the concepts that you were playing with here? It, it, you know, it struck me as innocence and original sin versus knowledge and consciousness.

You're absolutely right.

It has to do with-The old ideas of innocence and experience, that's the terms that William Blake, the great poet and painter, uh, used for the two contrary states of the human soul, as he put it.

We begin by being innocent, and then later on as we grow up, gradually we lose that innocence, but we become experienced.

This is a very old idea, which, um, I was playing with, and it s- seemed to me I could symbolize this by the dæmon.

It's another way in which the dæmon was very useful, because when you're a child in Lyra's world, your dæmon can change shape.

It can be a moth one minute, a, a snake the next, a dog, a cat, a cow, anything.

What got you to this place of showing us a damaged beloved character?

Mm-hmm.

When A.A. Milne was ed- associate editor of Punch, which was in the early part of the century, n- n- up to the Great War and through the '20s and so on, he published cartoon after cartoon of... which, which, which were all the same, the same joke.

It's a little child, often in a state of semi-nudity, in the bath or changing on the beach or something, saying something unbearably cute and sweet and charming, and, a- and adults looking on fondly.

Um, which actually curdle the stomach when you see them now.

I, I, I, I mentioned the Curtis.

I, I've got a copy of, a bound set of Punch for those years, which I inherited from my mother, and it wasn't until I'd looked through it a- a- and noticed this.

I was thinking about the children's literature and innocence and experience thing at the time.

Mm-hmm.

Is imagination more than make-believe? We know that children have it and we think we lose, we often lose it as adults.

It all depends on what you think the imagination is.

A lot of people think that it's just the power of making things up.

It's just daydreaming or it's just taking two bits of stuff and putting them together.

Like taking a horse and a man and you put them together.

Oh, you made a centaur.

Aren't you clever? Well, I don't see imagination like that at all.

Did that impact you creatively, do you think?