For eight years the only way to quieten down the both neglected and spoiled brat was to

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For eight years the only way to quieten down the both neglected and spoiled brat was to tell him stories about a wild creature sharing many of his naughty characteristics: Mr Toad.However fantastic the worlds created by these children's writers, they came directly out of actual experience and obsessions. Six-year- old J M Barrie, it turns out, was also rejected by his mother, who was grief-stricken at the death of her older son; he reinstated himself by dressing up in his dead brother's clothes and even managing to whistle like him.For five-year-old Kenneth Grahame, it was his mother who died and his father who departed into exile and alcoholism, leaving his children to the care of their not particularly affectionate grandmother. Similarly, you don't have to be a member of the Institute of Psychiatry to work out that the creator of Peter Pan was severely challenged in the growing-up stakes. Possibly he was abused by a relative as a ten-year-old; he was certainly rejected by his mother when little more than a toddler.No wonder, explains Wullschlager, he created in his subsequent life and nonsense poems the childhood he never enjoyed. Lear himself was the 20th of the 21 children of a bankrupt stockbroker.

Although the fifth, A A Milne, spent his first few decades c/o Easy Street, he would later have received counselling from Claire Rayner for his terminal split with the real Christopher Robin, his only son. The adult Lewis Carroll would have been locked up for pestering mothers for permission to photograph their little girls in various stages of undress - and the press would have made much of his being an Oxford don and clergyman who refused to have his own photo taken on the sabbath, even when fully clothed. The loved ones of Edward Lear were above the age of consent, but unfortunately were male and liable to become Viceroy of India, which in Victorian times ruled out much of a meaningful relationship. He ends millennially, depressed by the present but hopeful of a cultural resurgence in 2001 that will wake Deep England from its sleep.. BEDTIME stories will not seem the same. Of the five classic children's writers in Jackie Wullschlager's survey, four would today have been taken into care at an early age.

Why is it that structuralism and Thatcherism emerged during the same period of British history, for example? Are they part of the same spirit, is one a reaction to the other, or is there no real link? Hewison sometimes struggles with cause and effect.But apart from this, and an obsessive preoccupation with the New Left, Hewison does his job well, at times making even the Arts Council seem almost interesting. Even William Rees-Mogg, when its chairman, joined in the consumerist sloganising: "the arts are to British tourism what the sun is to Spain". Some arts administrators have been better than others, but few have succeeded in resisting intrusion. The "arm's length principle" is still piously invoked, but the arm has long disappeared inside the maw (or up some other orifice) of the beast Mammon.Cultural history is hard to write, especially when you have to cover a half century during which, as Hewison acknowledges, definitions of culture have themselves changed enormously It means making risky connections between art and politics.