Among the post-war generation of children's writers none is more individual and more unpredictable than Diana Wynne Jones. Of her next book all one can be sure of is that it will be exciting, amusing and unlike the last. For one who treads the tricky paths of fantasy that is saying quite a lot.

In some ways the society shown in Witch Week is not unlike that of present-day England. Larwood House School is; in a nasty way, similar to other boarding schools. The pupils are not much more horrid than others; the teachers are odd, but then some of them are in real life. But something is wrong, as if we were looking at reality through a distorting glass. There is this preoccupation with witchcraft. And in an apparently civilized society witches, of all ages and both sexes, are burnt. With the Inquisitor ready to move in...