The Famous Five haven’t ‘gone woke’ – they’re just not as tedious as they used to be

You couldn’t have paid me to read when I was a child. This was the late Nineties and early Noughties, and had tried their hardest to make these 1940s tales of derring-do appeal to pre-teen readers like me. Her book jackets had suddenly come to be illustrated much in the same way , full of scared teenagers dressed in T-shirts and jeans and fleeing imminent danger. But crack one of those books open and you were met with proof that you’d been duped: these were actually stories about stuffy English youths from a bygone past, not cool