My boys have really been enjoying a bedtime recitation of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children. The poems have a wonderful accessible meter, mordant humor, and memorably violent or humiliating deaths inflicted on children.

Calvin Tompkins wrote an appreciation of the Tales for the New Yorker almost a decade ago. There is a slight satirization of the Victorian upper class, and even English self-conception, a kind of spikiness in the text that could have come only from Belloc, a Francophile and Catholic.