The ghost downstairs tantalises with fleeting likenesses—among them Bosch and Breughel, Coleridge and M. R. James; the last not only because "a ghost in the sunshine is a fearful thing" but also because of Leon Garfield's urbane, polished style….

The Pathetic Fallacy is used brilliantly in this book; fog and sunshine, the gloom of a basement and the fiery flickering of a steam train, by turns reflect and represent the alternating moods of greedy hope and sharp despair as the clerk, who has sold not his soul but seven years of his childhood to the old man downstairs, realises his mistake and tries in vain to think of a way out of the ingenious legal contract he has devised so cunningly. The book takes the form of a novella in two parts, with an elaborate system of loud and soft passages leading to a colossal crescendo and then to a coda of piercing sweetness. This is a fine piece of writing…. This is not a book for all children, or exclusively for children. Certainly it is not for anyone who reads for the story alone and has no feeling for words. Ultimately its value lies in its whole and not in its parts, as a piece of original, stimulating literature in an inevitable form. (p. 1973)

[In] Leon Garfield's Child O'War … the author presents both the hero and the sea battles he takes part in stereoscopically. Sir John Theophilus Lee, the youngest boy—at the age of five and a half—ever to join His Majesty's Navy, and on whose actual memoirs the story is based, is shown to us not only as a snobbish old man reminiscing but through the eyes of his own children watching him; the stark facts of a British sailor's life and the peerless actions they fought in are shown in a fuzz of extemporization, through receding archways of fretwork, as it were.

Though Leon Garfield's inventive re-creation of the Victorian scene is as ingenious as ever, though, even at several removes and through the pen of Sir T. Lee, the clear facts of the sea battles compel their own lucid prose, the two do not mix; it is as though someone had spun a cocoon of candy floss round a piece of steel. There are two stories here, one of fanciful family life and the other of straight, unwhimsical action, and though both may be in the memoirs each would seem to be for an entirely different taste. It is difficult to believe that a young reader following Alexander and Swiftsure into action would want to be switched to Euphemia's predilection for jelly, or that anyone sharing Henrietta's romantic dreams would care much about the line of battle at Cape St Vincent. Between them the interest flickers hither and thither, like a compass needle gone mad. (p. 807)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1972; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), July 14, 1972.