Blast off

Forget Yuri Gagarin: Britain got there first. So, at least, runs the story in Diana Ross’s 1956 The Little Red Engine and the Rocket, now reissued, with Leslie Woods’s bold, jazzy illustrations, as an Andre Deutsch Classic. “It’s about building a rocket and how the Little Red Engine helps,” explained Josh (aged four-and-a-half). “I learned what it’s like to be in space—it’s fun and you float.” Fifties can-do fervour is well to the fore. As the engine himself put it, “In you get and away we go.” £6.99, ISBN 023399405X.