Penguin Books poll to mark 200th anniversary of author's birth reveals miser from A Christmas Carol as best loved

A cold-hearted miser bullied by ghosts into gaining a conscience has triumphed over a festering, jilted bride and an alcoholic, nihilistic barrister – not to mention the odd pickpocket and escaped convict – to be named the most popular Charles Dickens character.

Ebenezer Scrooge saw off many of the writer's best known and loved creations, including Miss Havisham, Sydney Carton, the Artful Dodger, Fagin, Nancy and Magwitch, in a Penguin Books poll commissioned to mark the 200th anniversary this week of Dickens's birth.

The top 10 is light on unadulterated goodness, with only Pip and Joe Gargery from Great Expectations and Betsey Trotwood from David Copperfield representing the kinder faces among the Dickensian ranks.

And although the list is heavily slanted towards Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, Oliver himself was left wanting more votes at No 11.

Claire Tomalin, whose highly acclaimed biography of Dickens was published last year, said that Scrooge's popularity was surprising given that his 21st-century equivalent might be a banker.

"But Dickens excelled in creating villains, and always gave them more energy and brio than his good characters, so that we never forget them," she said. "Scrooge is a monster, a wicked employer and a heartless miser, but he is allowed to repent and see the error of his ways."

Some of Britain's bestselling authors also picked their favourite Dickens characters. Tim Lott and Josephine Cox opted for Pip and Oliver respectively; Freya North chose Uriah Heep, describing him as a "loathsome character who seeps from the pages like a noxious gas"; Daisy Goodwin went for "the anti-heroine of Bleak House", Lady Dedlock, while Adele Parks favoured the "morally ambiguous" Nancy from Oliver Twist.

Tomalin has also used the anniversary to lament young readers' inability to get to grips with Dickens.

"Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner," she said.

"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that's a pity."

Tomalin described Dickens as "the greatest creator of characters in English" after Shakespeare and stressed his enduring relevance to Britain in 2012.

"When he went to America in 1842, one of the points he made was that the 'unimportant' and 'peripheral' people were just as interesting to write about as 'great' people," she said.

"You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840s is still relevant – the great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt members of parliament, how the country is run by old Etonians, you name it, he said it."

Events are taking place across the globe to mark Dickens's 200th birthday on Tuesday 7 February, including a street party in the road where he was born in Portsmouth, and a wreath-laying ceremony at his grave in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, London. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall will attend the abbey ceremony, where readers will include Tomalin and the actor and director Ralph Fiennes. The British Council has also organised a global Dickens read-a-thon, which will see a reading marathon lasting 24 hours in 24 different countries from Albania to Zimbabwe.

Publishers face secrecy over sales and an absence of industry-wide data to help them plot strategy

Kindle-owning bibliophiles are furtive beasts. Their shelves still boast classics and Booker winners. But inside that plastic case, other things lurk. Sci-fi and self-help. Even paranormal romance, where vampires seduce virgins and elves bonk trolls.

The ebook world is driven by so-called genre fiction, categories such as horror or romance. It's not future classics that push digital sales, but more downmarket fare. No cliche is left unturned, no adjective underplayed. At the time of writing, the bestselling Amazon Kindle book was Asylum Harbor, by Traci Hohenstein. Crime sells. Try a sample, I dare you. In digital, dross rises. But does this have implications for publishers' decision-making, as we increasingly migrate?

One of the problems publishers face in setting strategy is the absence of industry-wide data on ebook sales. Amazon, the dominant player, is secretive with its numbers. As the company revealed its mixed results for 2011 last week, all its UK division would say was that ebook sales over the past three months were up five-fold on the equivalent period last year. No actual data.

Amazon has started supplying data to Nielsen BookData in the US for the Wall Street Journal's bestseller lists, but the information is limited. UK publishers know their own genre titles do best as Amazon tells them this privately; across the industry there is nothing to go on.

A study in the US last year by Publishers Weekly and Bowker found that literary fiction outsold all forms of genre fiction, winning 20% of market share. But this figure includes classics. Most new Kindle owners buy an avalanche of classics in their initial excitement. All of Trollope for £1.99! All of Dickens for £3! But are they actually read? The genre of sci-fi came in at 19% and Christian fiction, God help us, third, at 16%.

Price is a big driver of digital sales. Self-publishing authors have cannily priced themselves into the game. Publishers watched the demise of the music and newspaper industries. Should they keep prices high and differentiate their wares from the unedited efforts of the self-published? Should they cut prices for ebooks and risk accelerating the decline of print?

But price is not the only factor. Industry figures point to the mechanism of searching for new titles – genre sells well because its readers know what they like and where to find it. On finishing one read, it's the matter of seconds before you can summon another from the ether.

Mills & Boon has done particularly well. While 6%-12% of the UK book market is digital, depending on whom you speak to, Mills & Boon publish in excess of 100 digital titles every month, and only 55 physical ones. Tim Cooper, its digital marketing director, says it is helped by its "habit-forming books". Fresh subgenres are emerging. Fancy a Christian romance, or a racy paranormal shagathon? Easy. Last week, on its website, it was promoting "Sheikhs vs Greeks". The realist version would be "megalomaniac misogynist vs bankrupt tax-dodger". Mmm, which should a girl choose!

There is a literary snobbishness at play here, clearly. Reading has always been a competitive sport. Why else would anyone have read Ulysses? Consider those boys who read ostentatious poetry to pull winsome girls; the girls who read Vanity Fair to let the poetical boys know that they are clever and minxy.

The reading public in private is lazy and smutty. E-readers hide the material. Erotica sells well. My own downmarket literary fetish is male-oriented historical fiction (histfic). Swords and sails stuff. I'm happier reading it on an e-reader, and keeping shelf space for books that proclaim my cleverness.

Publishers say that there is little real change going on, just substitution: those who buy genre books start buying digitally instead. I'm not so sure it is wise to underestimate the boundless idiocy of the unobserved reading public. They may intend to go to the Economist website to read the latest in the euro crisis, but oops! they've ended up on Mail Online reading about the Kardashians. Traci Hohenstein, anyone?

Bronze sculptures by my friend Mike Gillespie, who has died aged 82, can be seen in several Cambridge colleges, at the Gas Research Centre at Loughborough University and in numerous private collections in Britain and abroad. He urged people not to look for "meaning" in his work but to attend to it as they might listen to music.

Born in London, he was educated at St Paul's school and Hammersmith College of Art (1952-56). Mike's sculpture was often abstract, dealing with balance and weight in a way that created a sensation of movement and dance in bronze, but he also created figurative works, including a number of commissioned bronze portraits, and a powerful series based on images from the second world war. In all these works, whether abstract or figurative, there is a strong sense of inner forms being revealed, not in a static way but always with the possibility of motion.

Mike will also be remembered by many as a fine bronze-caster, working for Jacob Epstein to produce numerous bronze heads and also for Elisabeth Frink, who called him the best bronze caster in England. In 1969 he wrote Studio Bronze Casting with John W Mills. In 1979 Frink arranged that Mike should cast a copy of the great bronze sanctuary knocker on the door of Durham Cathedral. This fearsome object was kept in the family bathroom for a while, hung above the bath, waiting for steam to turn the patina an ancient green.

After suffering a stroke in 2002, Mike was no longer able to cast bronze, but he continued to work, welding metal one- handed to create the forms that meant so much to him. He kept working until the end of his life. A keen lover of music, he rote extensively about his philosophy of art.

Mike was a respected teacher of sculpture, portraiture and life drawing. As a dedicated craftsman as well as an artist, he also taught bronze casting at his alma mater Hammersmith, and at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology and Hertfordshire College of Art.

Mike is survived by his wife, Lesley, and their children, Nick, Anna and Douglas, as well as eight grandchildren.

The Australian writer Andrew McMillan has died at the age of 54. When he was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2010, Andrew announced a "living wake", which was documented by an Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV crew. His friends rallied to his cause, funding a comfortable venue and nursing staff, and, from an apartment in Darwin's main street, he held court bedside, continued writing and formed a band, the Rattling Mudguards, with whom he recorded a CD.

He had begun his writing career under the influence of gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson. As a schoolboy in Brisbane, he freelanced for Rock Australia Magazine. He later wrote for Rolling Stone and a range of mainstream Australian papers.

He travelled to Darwin in 1986 to follow a pioneering tour of remote Northern Territory communities by Midnight Oil and the Warumpi Band. This resulted in his book Strict Rules: The Blackfella-Whitefella Tour, published in 1988. Andrew moved to Darwin permanently that year. In the words of his friend Chips Mackinolty: "He came to the Territory chasing music as a journalist … and never looked back as a writer."

In 1991 he formed the Fourth Estate, a ragtag band of journalists playing typewriter chorus alongside professional musicians; I played occasionally with the band. In 1992, Sceptre published Death in Dili, in which Andrew bore witness to Indonesia's military occupation of East Timor. His best-known work was An Intruder's Guide to East Arnhem Land, published in 2001. Catalina Dreaming, a history of Darwin-based flying boats in the second world war, followed a year later. In 2008 he contributed to Tiwi Footy, a beautiful photographic work by Monica Napper and Peter Eve about the champion Aboriginal footballers of the Tiwi islands, in a bilingual English-Tiwi edition.

Andrew etched his personality on to Northern Territory society and was deeply engaged with the Aboriginal community, following in the footsteps of tropical chroniclers such as Ion Idriess, Bill Harney, Douglas Lockwood and Xavier Herbert.

He is survived by his mother, Lorna.

My father, the poet and writer Basil Payne, has died aged 88. Basil believed a poet's job was to act not as an oracle, but as a catalyst. He wanted his words to take the reader on a reflective journey of enlightenment, shaped by their own experience.

He was born in Dublin. As a child, he attended the city's Synge Street Christian Brothers school, known for its stern teachers. He then worked as a shipping company clerk while attending night classes at University College Dublin. Upon completing his degree, and on the basis of a paper he wrote on health insurance in Ireland, Basil was asked to join the board of Ireland's first voluntary health insurance company, the VHI. At this time, he was also writing poetry and plays, and reviewing books and films for the Irish Times and writing plays and reviews for Radio Éireann.

Basil won the Guinness international poetry competition for his poem Enemies in 1964. During the 1970s he began lecturing on poetry at Trinity College Dublin and presented his one-man show, In Dublin's Quare City, at the Peacock theatre. In 1971, he left his job at the VHI and moved to the US with his wife, Monessa, and their family on a six-month university lectureship which turned into a four-year "voluntary exile". After his return to Ireland, he occasionally interrupted his writing to give readings and presentations, but in the main he became reclusive, often suffering from bouts of depression.

Basil often told the tale of how his mother "sung him awake" when he was born. The nurse who was with him at the end told me how she used to sing him to sleep. He died as I was on a ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea, on my way to see him for the last time. I had hoped to see his face light up as I told him of an invitation to read his work at the Cheltenham poetry festival and that his first poetry book, Sunlight on a Square (1961), was now on Amazon's Kindle. From that collection, Lines in Memory of My Father personifies his role as a catalytic and cathartic poet. It opens:

Fishing, one morning early in July
From the canal bank – that was the closest ever
We came to entering each other's world

Basil died on Little Christmas (Epiphany), the day that Joyce's short story The Dead takes place. In his later years Basil would often recite the final paragraph verbatim. We shared a love of those words, sadly one of the few things we had in common.

Monessa died in 2003. Basil is survived by his children, me, Norbert, Lucy, Gregory, Bernard, Michael and Christopher; and his 11 grandchildren.

"I would recommend this book to anyone aged between eight and twelve who likes to find out about other children's lives. It is so beautifully written and easy to read"

Julie is like any other year six schoolgirl thinking about clothes, boys and best friends until, in her last term of Primary school, her teacher asks her to be the good guide to two Mongolian brothers who turn up at the school. They are oddly dressed in huge woolly coats which they don't want to take off and Chengis, the older one is very protective of his younger brother Nergui. Chengis has a polaroid camera and he shows Julie a lot of photographs showing scenes from Mongolia. Julie's mother welcomes the boys into her home and Julie would like to pay a return visit but she soon finds out that this is not likely to happen. The whole family lives in fear and thinks that demons are trying to steal Nergui, so Chengis is constantly doing things to try to confuse the demons. One day the boys just disappear and it is not until she returns to the school as a grown up and finds Nergui's coat, still in the lost property cupboard, that she really understands what happened to them and why they behaved in the way they did.

This is a book that really made me think because Chengis, Nergui and their mother are afraid all the time. Chengis took great responsibility for looking after his brother. It was especially interesting for me because my Uncle's wife is Mongolian. I have found out that it is an absolutely enormous country and once it had the biggest Empire that the world has ever known. The characters are very real and the story made me glad that I live in a country where the thing that I am most frightened of is the possibility of a big hairy legged spider that might be lurking under my bed. I was so pleased that the book had a happy ending.
I would recommend this book to any one between eight and twelve who likes to find out about other children's lives. It is so beautifully written that it is easy to read.

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Former Cuban president makes rare appearance to present 1,000-page book, Guerrilla of Time, charting his rise to power

Fidel Castro has made a rare public appearance to launch his memoirs.

The increasingly reclusive former Cuban president spent six hours presenting the two-volume book to an audience in Havana.

State television showed a smiling, animated Castro wearing a dark tracksuit over a blue plaid button-up shirt. Audio of him speaking was not broadcast, but the Communist party newspaper Granma said he told attendees at the event on Friday that they would hear about "two books you haven't had any news of".

The memoir, Guerrilla of Time, is almost 1,000 pages long and covers Castro's life from childhood until December 1958, the eve of the triumph of the Cuban revolution. It is based on interviews with the journalist Katiuska Blanco.

"I have to take advantage now, because memory fades," Granma quoted Castro as saying.

The 85-year-old stepped aside provisionally in 2006 because of a life-threatening illness and retired permanently two years later, clearing the way for his younger brother and long-designated successor, Raúl, to take over.

Fidel Castro is seldom seen in public, though he did appear at a Communist party congress last April, holding the arm of an aide as he entered to tears and a standing ovation.

Granma said he mused about a wide range of topics on Friday, including visits from foreign dignitaries, world events and technological advances. He reportedly expressed deep opposition to private education and said Cuban leaders were wrong to think that simply by implementing socialism, all the island's economic problems would be solved. "Our duty is to fight until the last minute for our country, for our planet and for humanity," he was quoted as saying.

Castro generally speaks to Cubans through occasional columns called Reflections that are published in government-run newspapers and presented on television by newsreaders.

As part of our series exploring Britain's architectural wonders, the Observer's architecture critic introduces a spectacular interactive 360-degree panoramic view of this classic example of the Jacobean long gallery

• Explore the Chastleton House long gallery panoramic here

The long gallery was the special contribution of Elizabethan and Jacobean society to architecture that deals with the passing of time: it was a place for walking in bad weather, for contemplating and showing off art and ancestral portraits and, therefore, combined the rhythms of exercise, meteorology and genealogy. A smallish but satisfying example is in Chastleton House in the Cotswolds, built by a rich wool merchant (or possibly lawyer), whose family later dissipated his wealth and so were unable to alter the original building. Nikolaus Pevsner called the decoration of Chastleton "blatantly nouveau riche, even barbaric, uninhibited by any consideration of insipid good taste", but it now it looks gentle and charming, softened by wobbles in wood and plaster and the fall of light. It is also more bare than it would have been, in the absence of its original artworks and tapestries. What is particularly pleasurable is the way the stuff of the ceiling – ornamental plaster – descends, while the stuff of the floor – wood – rises in the form of panelling and the two meet at mid-height. It gives a boat-like sense of enclosure and protection.

The Congress party of Nehru and Indira Gandhi is accused of sacrificing free speech to make a comeback in India's most populous state

You can find the Islamic Centre of India in the Aishbagh neighbourhood of the north-eastern city of Lucknow, flanked by a Hindu temple and a wedding hall. Most evenings the call to prayer competes – or coexists – with the thumping bass of Bollywood dance tunes that accompany the nuptial celebrations of the city's middle classes. Often it is the centre itself that is the source of music, although the couples that hire its lawns for their wedding parties choose classical melodies that Muslim musicians have played in the city for centuries.

Lucknow, the capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh, has long been an important centre of south Asian Islamic culture. These days the music in the city – whether from films or mystic masters of Sufism – is being drowned out by the discordant tunes blaring from the tinny speakers on the campaign vehicles of political parties.

It is election time in the northern state of more than 200 million people, India's most populous, which if independent would be the world's fifth largest country.

Polling for the legislative assembly begins this week, and will last for three weeks because the state is so vast. Though politics in Uttar Pradesh rarely attracts much attention outside India, last month the battle for votes here hit global headlines.

A key constituency are the state's many Muslims, who account for about 18% of the population. This group could eventually swing some power in the state back to Congress, the party of the Gandhi dynasty, after a gap of more than 20 years. Congress will not win outright, but even a small improvement from its low level of support would be a victory. Critics claim that the Congress-led national government in Delhi was pursuing this Muslim vote when it very publicly failed to intervene to support Salman Rushdie, after ultra-conservative Islamic groups called for him to be stopped from speaking at a recent literary festival in India. According to the organisers of the event, this was a "defeat for free speech" and thus a "tragedy".

Rushdie, born in India, spoke of his disappointment at finding the country no longer committed to secularism and liberty, but a place where "religious extremists can prevent free expression of ideas at a literary festival [and where] the politicians are too … in bed with those groups to wish to oppose them for narrow electoral reasons".

For a few days, the dispute continued. Muslim groups said it was right that the author of The Satanic Verses, the 1988 book considered insulting to the prophet Muhammad, was prevented from talking. Liberals castigated the government for putting votes in Uttar Pradesh before principles. Few bothered to talk to Muslims in the state. For Khalid Rasheed, the cleric and scholar who directs the Islamic Centre in Aishbagh, the Muslim groups that had called for Rushdie to be denied entry to India were speaking for the community. "All Muslims are united. The words used by Salman Rushdie cannot be tolerated by any Muslims," Rasheed said.

Certainly, if Muslims in Lucknow and elsewhere are asked what they think of Rushdie the answer is uniform. "If anyone writes that against any religion, it is not tolerable," said Misba Khan, 31, a social worker. "Of course he should not be allowed to come and talk. He is out to create hatred."

But push a little further and a slightly different picture emerges, particularly in terms of how the state's Muslims might vote and why. Uttar Pradesh has poverty levels worse than most of sub-Saharan Africa. More than half of the children are chronically malnourished and nearly half of women cannot read or write.

About 100 miles north of Lucknow, and 40 miles south of the Nepal border, is the scruffy town of Gonda. It lies in one of the poorest parts of Uttar Pradesh. The roads that exist are so pitted and holed that the short distance from the state capital takes more than three hours.

It is a desolate drive, even in winter, when temperatures are bearable. In summer, crows fall dead from the sky in temperatures of 45C or higher. Most villages are without power; almost none have proper sanitation; many comprise little more than a miserable huddle of mud and straw huts.

About half the population are either Dalits, the caste at the bottom of India's ancient but still tenacious social hierarchy, or Muslims who, repeated surveys have shown, are among the most disadvantaged people in India. Even in the towns, life is little better.

"The government says there is electricity 14 hours every day, but if we get two or three we are lucky," said Dinesh Shukla, a journalist in Gonda. "There are no jobs. There is nothing."

Five years ago, Dalit and Muslim votes carried the firebrand populist Mayawati Kumari to power in Uttar Pradesh. She is hoping that the support of the same communities will, despite the rampant corruption and broad lack of development during her reign, bring her another five-year term. A second caste-based party is her biggest challenger. The Congress party comes a weak third or even fourth behind the Hindu nationalist BJP.

Last week, as Mayawati addressed a rally in Gonda, only a hundred yards away Muslim barbers cut and shaved their customers without even lifting their heads when the chief minister's helicopter circled and landed.

"If Congress had helped Rushdie come, then we would have been angry. No Muslim likes him. But that doesn't mean we are going to vote for them. We will vote for people who make our lives better," said Kaleem. "No one listens to the poor people anyway."

Uttar Pradesh was long the fief of India's foremost political dynasty. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first prime minister, and his daughter Indira Gandhi, perhaps its most controversial leader, both held parliamentary seats in the state. Now it is the turn of Indira Gandhi's grandchildren, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, to campaign in the dusty lanes and villages of the dynastic seats near Lucknow. This adds a personal dimension to the fight for the Muslim vote in the state.

The old city of Lucknow is a labyrinth of alleys choked by cows, motorbikes, chickens and filth. Vast monuments dating from the time when the city was a centre of refined culture, wealth and power rear up above the jumble of rooftops and wires. Old houses with ornate plasterwork that are now home to scores of destitute families disintegrate slowly.

The glorious past of the city, from where the nawabs of Awadh once ruled before being deposed by the British, is evident everywhere.

At a religious school where hundreds of students learn Arabic, English and Persian, the language of the Mughal and Awadhi courts, Farooq Alvi, who runs a perfume business, spoke of how his family had been using the same techniques since "the time of Shah Jahan", the 17th-century emperor who built the Taj Mahal.

The glorious history is now long gone. In a cramped office, Zafaryab Jilani, a Muslim lawyer at the high court, said that little had changed in recent years despite India's economic growth. "Some of India is shining … but not all of India," he said.

Near by, underneath a vast poster advertising a satellite television channel devoted to discussions and recitals of accounts of the prophet's deeds, Mohammed Saeed, 69, served tea for four rupees a cup.

Illiterate and half-blind, Saeed had not heard of the Rushdie affair. He spoke instead of his ill wife and his children, all seven of whom had died of various illnesses, leaving their parents alone in their old age.

"The best time for Uttar Pradesh? That would be in the 1950s, when I was young, and food was cheap and there were less people and the air was good and the water didn't make you sick," he said.

'Tim and Ginger are in a lot of books by Edward Ardizzone and I love all of them'

This book is about a little girl called Charlotte. It is also about two boys called Tim and Ginger. Tim and Ginger are in a lot of books by Edward Ardizzone and I love all of them.

Tim and Ginger live in a house called Sea View, right by the seaside. They love ships and sailing and have many adventures.

In this book, Tim and Ginger find Charlotte washed-up on the beach after a storm. She is wearing a pink frock and a life belt and she is unconscious. They take her home to Sea View and Tim's mother puts her to bed with lots of hot water bottles and calls the doctor.

Charlotte has lost her memory. Despite putting up posters all over town, Tim's family cannot trace her parents.

Charlotte is about five years old and has blue eyes and curly hair. She is very happy living with Tim's family.

One day, her Aunt Agatha arrives at the house. Instantly, Charlotte recognises her and she cries, 'Aunt Agatha! Oh, now I remember who I am!'

It turns out that Charlotte is an orphan and Aunt Agatha is her guardian. One day, she was washed-overboard from a yacht. Luckily, she was wearing her lifebelt. Aunt Agatha had been looking for her everywhere but could not find her. In the end, she had almost given up hope.

Aunt Agatha takes Charlotte back to their home - a great big house with lots of servants and toys. Tim and Ginger miss her very much - and she misses Tim and Ginger so dreadfully that she gets so thin and ill that doctors are called. Each one is more expensive than the next but it does not good. However, a very, very expensive doctor comes and he is kind and talks to Aunt Agatha and Charlotte and finds the cure.

One of my favourite parts of this book is when Tim and Ginger have a fight at school because the other boys find letters Tim is writing to Charlotte and say that he is in love with her. Tim and Ginger are very brave and win the fight.

I won't tell you everything that happens in this story as you should read it yourself and I don't want to spoil it. It is very exciting indeed.

This book looks wonderful as it is full of beautiful paintings and drawings. Some of the pictures have speech bubbles in them and I particularly like reading these out and making-up voices for the characters. The seaside is everywhere in the book, and I would love to go and live at Sea View and have all those adventures.

I am desperate to write a list of all the other Tim and Ginger books, so here I go ...

This one - Tim and Charlotte
Tim All Alone - my next favourite
Ship's Cook Ginger - also a favourite, especially the line, 'Don't Eat the Pie! It is poisonous!'
Tim and Lucy Go to Sea - I love this one, too. My favourite bit is when the pirates come aboard.
Tim's Friend Towser - with a brilliant dog in it.
Tim to the Rescue
Tim in Danger
Tim and Ginger
Tim to the Lighthouse
Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain
Tim's Last Voyage

I also really like another book by Edward Ardizzone called, 'Diana and her Rhinoceros'. My favourite bit is when the rhinoceros, 'made a noise which sounded just like "Toast"'.

Please read them all!

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