– Introduction –

not, as I had modestly expected, the author, but a curiouslynamed child of whom, at this time, I had scarcely heard. It was this Christopher Robin who kept mice, walked on the lines and not in the squares, and wondered what to do on a spring morning; it was this Christopher Robin, not I, whom Americans were clamouring to see; and, in fact (to make due acknowledgement at last), it was this Christopher Robin, not I, not the publishers, who was selling the book in such large and ridiculous quantities.

Overwhelming success is harder to deal with than failure. At least failure has an element of hope in it. Success asserts a huge gravitational pull from which it’s almost impossible to achieve escape velocity. Look how Conan Doyle struggled with Sherlock Holmes. How Steve Coogan keeps going back to Alan ­Partridge. How J. K. Rowling keeps returning to the Potter universe. Milne never returned. His refusal to dilute the legacy is partly why the colours of the ­Hundred Acre Wood are so fresh. He walked out of the trees, up to Galleon’s Leap, and out into the World. Then he tried to stop a war.

The man who invented Winnie the Pooh said that the book he was most proud of writing was Peace with Honour – an anti-war polemic written in 1934. Nowadays, the whole idea of campaigning for appeasement in the 1930s has such a bad reputation that it’s easy to forget that Milne was not the only one to argue against going to war with Nazi Germany. The book was a xv